September 2025
Closing Down for Winter - Alan Riach Newsletter
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.
Hopefully your varroa levels were not too high and if they were highish, that you have treated successfully. I know several people are attempting to move their bees towards having varroa tolerant queens and there is now an EMBA WhatsApp group for this. However, until you are sure that you truly have varroa tolerant queens, then you must still treat.
The document “Managing Varroa”, (MV) on Beebase, is the best guide available for dealing with the little pests.
https://www.nationalbeeunit.com/assets/PDFs/3_Resources_for_beekeepers/Advisory_leaflets/APHA_Managing_Varroa_2020_ELECTRONIC_ONLY-1.pdf The target drop rate is less than 1 mite per day. Count the total number of mites on the varroa floor tray, and divide by number of days left there (7 is minimum) and for September multiply this number by 100. This will give you an estimate of mites in the hive and that number needs to be less than 1000.
You will have your honey harvested and stored in food grade plastic buckets by now and the extracted supers cleaned up by the bees. They clean them best if you put them back on the hives above an empty super, otherwise they may refill them if there is a late flow. Store them safely in your bee shed in poly bags or sealed up in some other way to keep the wax moth out, although wax moths are not that attracted to clean supers, they prefer the remnants of larvae faeces and cocoons in old brood frames.
Everything has been so early this year that I expect many of you will already have fed your bees for winter. I fed mine mid-August as there was no longer nectar coming in and some of the hives were light. Because of the early year and the lowish amount of food in the brood boxes, I fed generously this year, 15 to 16 litres of syrup per colony instead of the usual 12 to 13.
15 litres of strong syrup (1 kg sugar to 0.55 litre of water) will contain about 12 kg sugar. 15 litres of proprietary invert feed will contain about 10.5 kg sugar. For those without access to a Costco card the cheapest sugar I have seen currently is Farmfoods (£1.50 for 2 kg and a £2 voucher reduction for purchases of £25)
By this time of year, the feeding should be completed as soon as possible as it is becoming rather cold for the bees to dry and store syrup. However, if you have been a bit tardy, do it as soon as possible. We should aim to ideally have 18 kg of food onboard all colonies before winter (about 14 kg sugar equivalent). That is equivalent to about 8 Smith or National brood frames full and leaves little space for the bees and their pollen stores. The ideal overwintering system with these small hives is to use the late Ian Craig’s double brood box 8+8 system. Eight frames in each box with dummies either side of the 8 packs.
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 and once they start they prefer to keep going until complete.
In the absence of a full form feeder, the 6 litre English feeder is a good choice, but Maisemore now have a “13 litre jumbo green” feeder for National hives. It can be adapted for Smiths and used with the roof removed as the feeder has a weatherproof cover.
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. The main cause of winter bee death is starvation and remember you have a legal responsibility to look after all animals in your care.
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 its nailed to the ground” – that’s a well-fed hive.
https://scottishbeekeepers.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Hive-weighing-method1.pdf
If you decide that the hive is a bit light, then place a couple of kg of fondant with a 3 cm hole in the bag on the crown board over the feed hole. Placing 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 its usually in the slightly warmer spring that they run short of food.
For those who have not yet fed, which may apply to those who went to the heather, I will repeat 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 round corners in order to attack. Wasps are often the main accused when it comes to robbing as they are very visual, 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 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 she will be isolated as the colony moves up during winter.
If you have a super with granulated honey, perhaps from Canola (oil seed rape) or clover, then nadir it, i.e. put it under the brood box, The bees will use the crystallized 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. You could 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 risk of robbing by Wasps and neighbouring bees should be past now 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 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.
Ensure all hives are “weather tight” and secure against wind. I usually put a ratchet strap around the hive and stand.
The EMBA bees that were taken to the heather this year have a reasonable quantity of honey in the supers and no doubt will also have stored some in the brood box. We had a very enjoyable Heather Picnic as you can see from the photo above. Thanks to John Hoskins for the photo and to Carrie for organising. This year we also had attendance by West Linton association.
