November 2024
Late Flyers - Newsletter from Alan Riach
Due to the unseasonably mild weather, the bees are still out and about. This is good news and bad news. The good news is that they will be harvesting some Ivy (Hedera helix) pollen (and some nectar). Pollen, being a proteinaceous (meaty) material, does not keep that well and although the bees are quite successful at storing it, sealed over with a layer of honey, nevertheless, by springtime it will have deteriorated. It is thus valuable to go into winter with as fresh pollen as possible in order to have usable pollen for rearing brood in the early spring before the flowers get going.
The bad news is that lots of bee activity at this time may be using quite a bit of winter stores. More than can be compensated for with the scraps of Ivy nectar that they can obtain. Best therefore to be ready with some fondant blocks by late winter/early spring. I usually put some on when I do the mid-winter varroa oxalic acid treatment.
The usual advice for checking that hives have sufficient stores is to “heft” – not a very technical instruction, and I have referenced a weighing method using a luggage weigher. See Technical Data sheet 21 on the SBA website https://scottishbeekeepers.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Hive-weighing-method1.pdf. With a conventional wooden single brood box hive, we would like to see 28 to 30 kg total hive weight, which would ensure about 18 kg of stores. What if the hive weight is below that, say only about 23 or 24 kg (13 or 14 kg of stores). Well, you may well be able to nurse the bees through winter and spring using fondant, but bee colonies are always more confident when they have plenty of stores – confident to get going with brood production in early spring, that critical time when the old age pensioners are dying off faster than the infants are being produced. Well-fed bees are confident bees and confident bees are the winners.
We can expect some windy weather from now on, and I would recommend that you secure your hives with lever ratchet straps, if possible, tied to or encircling the stand. Even if a strapped hive is blown over, the bees will survive a tumble, provided the hive does not split open.
