October 2026
Closing Down for Winter by Alan Riach
The bees should all be fed and sitting confidently with 18kg of food onboard. Beginners are always advised to “heft” their hives to ensure that they are sufficiently heavy, but knowing what a reasonable heft is needs some experience. It is not too difficult to weigh hives using a luggage weigher and a piece of stiff 3mm fence wire (or a M5 (5mm thread diameter) 1m long, screwed rod from your local Toolstation serves nicely). See Technical Data Sheet number 21 on the SBA website
A reasonable weight for a typical wooden single broodbox Smith or National hive would be 28 to 30 kg, with floor and roof. 26kg would be a bit light. If the colony is on double broodboxes, on 8 + 8 frames, 30 to 33 kg. 28kg would be a bit light. Polyhives could be a bit lighter due to the reduced weight of the equipment (approx. 4 or 5 kg less)
If you decide that the hive is a bit light, it is now rather late to feed liquid syrup as the bees will struggle to dry it after this time, leaving a risk of fermentation, so place a couple of kg of fondant on the crown board over the feed hole. Placing it here rather than directly on top of the frames prevents fondant softening and running down between the frames, which might endanger the queen. A reasonably strong colony will have no difficulty getting to the feed hole, especially as it’s usually in the slightly warmer spring that they run short of food. The bees may still get some ivy nectar and pollen, which is valuable for early Spring usage.
Generally, it has been a good honey season, although not at the EMBA heather site – the bees filled the supers but not with heather – probably rosebay, meadowsweet and thistle. However, we must be thankful for what we get.
Apply your mouse guards now. The metal strip ones with 9mm holes are most convenient, and to avoid the fight with map pins whilst wearing your gloves, use my method of pre-pinning. Put the map or drawing pin through the holes in the mouse guard before you don your gloves and wrap a piece of tape round the pin (point of pin piercing the tape) and guard to keep the pin in place. You can then simply push the taped pin into the hive without having to carry out a hopeless search for displaced pins in the grass. If you use a wood or plastic entrance block, ensure that the slot is less than 8mm high, as any larger and a mouse can deform its skull and squeeze in.
Ensure your hives are secure against winter winds. Strap the colonies with ratchet straps, as even if a hive does get blown over or knocked over by farm livestock, the bees will usually survive if the hive parts stay together.
Show time is here again. Do please support your local honey show (7th Nov at the Eric Liddell Centre). The show team are arranging raffle prizes this year; all you have to do to participate is to enter.
You can access Technical Data Sheet no. 26 on the SBA website, which advises on preparing entries for the show.
Also, worthwhile investing in a set of grading glasses and a bright LED torch (it is amazing what you see when you shine it onto the surface of your jar of show honey). Another very worthwhile investment for showing and general honey storage and marketing purposes is a refractometer to determine the water content of your honey. It is illegal to sell blossom honey over 20% moisture content (or over 23% for Ling Heather honey). I wouldn’t waste money on the very expensive digital devices; a good optical version is quite adequate, and these are available on eBay or Amazon for about £15, but remember it must be designed for testing honey. Get one that is ATC (Automatic Temperature Compensated).
If you have a super with granulated honey, perhaps from Canola (oilseed rape) or clover, then nadir it, i.e. put it under the brood box. The bees will use the crystallised honey in the early Spring whilst the queen is busy establishing brood in the brood box above it, but remember to remove the empty nadired super before the queen has descended downwards as the brood area expands. When harvesting your honey and finally removing the supers, you can also nadir any part-filled, uncapped supers that you have, and the bees will most likely take it up into the brood box – bees prefer to have their winter stores above the brood nest.
The SBA Convention and Honey Show last weekend was well attended, with interesting speakers on queen rearing and honey fraud. Norberto Garcia from Argentina had some interesting statistics on the rapid rise of Asian honey coming into the European, USA and African markets, showing a trend of reduction in Asian “honey” prices of 7% per year for the past 6 or 7 years. Most of this product is not honey as defined by USA and European standards but “dried nectar”. The nectar is removed as soon as the bees bring it in and is then dehydrated in large factory dehydration plants.
And thinking of Christmas, the time is approaching to start casually dropping hints to the family about “useful beekeeping items”. You are, after all, helping them with that difficult task of finding gifts.
