September 2024
Closing Down For the Season - Newsletter from Alan Riach
September is close-down month for the bees. However, there are still some flowers out, including the start of the ivy and the bees are taking the opportunity to cram in some handy pollen for use next Spring. The late pollen is valuable since pollen, being a proteinaceous substance, doesn’t keep that well and the fresher the better.
You will soon have most of your honey harvested and stored in food-grade plastic buckets and the supers extracted and cleaned up by the bees. Store them safely in your bee shed in poly bags to keep the wax moth out. Although wax moths are not that attracted to clean supers, they prefer the remnants of larval faeces in old brood frames.
When clearing supers, inevitably, there are frames with capped and with not yet capped honey. There are two ways of dealing with this. Double extraction – place the frames in your extractor without uncapping the sealed honey and
extract the “loose” unsealed honey, which can then be fed back to the bees via a feeder. The capped areas on the frames can then be uncapped and spun out as usable ripe honey. The second method is to “nadir”, i.e. place the part completed supers under the brood box before feeding. If the cappings on the small, sealed sections are broken, the bees will usually move that honey and the loose honey up into the brood box. Bees prefer to have their winter stores above the brood nest. The empty supers can then be removed and stored.
Check your varroa drop if you have not done so already and treat if necessary, using one of the treatments mentioned on Beebase. The document “Managing Varroa”, (MV) on Beebase is the best guide available for dealing with the little pests. The target drop rate is less than 1 mite per day, but check the MV document for up-to-date info. at https://nationalbeeunit.com/diseases-and-pests/varroa/how-do-i-manage-varroa
Matthew Richardson has written a useful guide on varroa actions, which is available on the EMBA website at Downloads.
Apivar is a common varroa treatment used at this time of year. It is based on Amitraz, a miticide developed by the Boots company of Nottingham in the 1960’s, especially for use in the treatment of mites and ticks on pets. Although it is a synthetic, it has proved fairly resistant to mites developing immunity to it. However, as with all treatments, it should only be used if needed and only kept on the hive for the 6-week treatment period. It must not be used with supers in place.
Aim to have feeding completed by mid September as it is then becoming rather cold for the bees to dry and store syrup.. We should aim to have 18kg of food onboard all colonies before winter. That is equivalent to about 8 Smith
or National brood frames full and leaves little space for the bees and their pollen stores. 18kg of stores on a single National or Smith broodbox will mean that it is packed tight. An alternative overwintering system with these small
hives is to use Ian Craig’s double brood box 8+8 system. Eight frames in each box with dummies on either side of the 8 packs. See Ian Craig’s My Beekeeping Year on the SBA website.
It is preferable to use large-format feeders for autumn feeding. A strong colony can take down 4 or 5 litres of syrup per day. I usually offer them 12 or 13 litres of strong syrup (10kg sugar made up at 0.55 litres of water per kg sugar). The 6-litre English feeder is a good compromise and fits inside an empty super.
Don’t be reluctant to feed your bees syrup. Sucrose is a perfectly natural substance for bees; it is, after all, the major constituent of nectar and the bees are perfectly designed for inverting sucrose into the simple sugars fructose and
glucose, which is the ideal winter feed. The main cause of winter bee death is starvation and remember you have a legal responsibility to look after all animals in your care. Many people now use proprietary feed syrups, which are made of inverted syrups. They are perfectly satisfactory, but about two times more expensive than making syrup with granulated sugar.
For those not yet confident of assessing the weight of a hive by “hefting”, you can weigh hives relatively easily using the method described here. It will let you see just how heavy a full hive is, as a beginner once said to me when I
asked him to heft one, it feels as if it’s “nailed to the ground”
https://www.scottishbeekeepers.org.uk/images/education/Hive%20weighing%20method.pdf
If during the winter you decide that the hive is a bit light, then 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 is usually in the slightly warmer spring that they run short of food.
For those who have not managed to feed by mid-September, which may apply to those who went to the heather, I will repeat the feed instructions here. Avoid feeding through the day if there are lots of flying bees about; wait until evening. Even then, feeding will usually cause a few bees to appear. Bees haven’t yet evolved a dance to inform their sisters that there is a good food source in the roof, and some may round dance when fed, which just says “get out there, and you’ll find it”. Some bees can then leave the hive and start searching and the search may extend to a weak colony. Should you see signs of robbing, lean a slate or similar against the front of the hive being robbed, shadowing the entrance. The occupants won’t have any difficulty exiting and entering the zig-zag path, but the robbers will not like having to go around corners in order to attack. Wasps are often the main accused when it comes to robbing, as they are very visible, but in truth, strong bee colonies are not above a bit of food reserve supplementation and are not so visible.
For those that went to the heather, the bees usually ensure that they squirrel away a good proportion of heather honey in the brood box, but still offer them some syrup. Don’t be tempted to remove frames of heather honey for
donation to weaker colonies. Bees seem to need to get gradually accustomed to heather honey, and sudden exposure to it can cause dysentery.
Some people have said that they are leaving on a super with some honey, not a practice I recommend, as it leads to a muddle in the Spring with the queen laying in the super and a confusion of frame sizes during artificial swarming next season. However, if you do leave a super on, remember to remove the queen excluder or the queen may well become isolated as the colony moves up during winter.
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. You can then remove the empty nadired super before the queen has descended downwards as the brood area expands.
The risk of robbing by Wasps and neighbouring bees should be past by mid-September, but no harm in keeping the entrances reduced to make guarding easy. In weak colonies, close to a width of 1cm.
Apply your mouse guards now. The metal strip ones with 8mm 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 thru small 1.5mm diameter holes in the mouse guard before you don your gloves and wrap a piece of tape around the pin and guard to keep the pin in place. A hole in the tape allows the head of the pin to be held as shown. 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.
Ensure all hives are “weather-tight” and secure against wind. I usually put a ratchet strap around the hive and stand.
