Hey everyone! It has been a crazy winter here and thankfully, according to the rodent, we are in for Spring sooner rather than later! Hurray! As I write this, I am looking outside to more of the white stuff along with freezing rain. As you know, I was over the cold weather weeks ago when it wasn’t even cold. But alas, here we are in February and we still have snow. At least we are closer to Spring and closer to Springing forward with daylight savings time! I am so happy that it is still light out past 5:00 in the afternoon. While we have been prepping for Spring in the garden, unfortunately, we have not been prepping for Spring in the apiary as we hoped we would, except to say we have ordered the equipment needed for the new round of bees that will be coming the first week of April. That’s right, it happened again. I lost my second hive a couple of weeks ago. 🙁
Here in East Tennessee we have had a crazy somewhat mild winter if you don’t count the five or so snows. In fact, we have had days that have gotten into the 70s and we have had times of 6 inches of snow. It is supposed to get to 65 here on Friday! It almost feels like we alternate each week between warm and crazy cold. Needless to say, this wreaks havoc on the bees; at least it did for mine. When it was warm during the day, it still got crazy cold at night. So if some of the girls didn’t make it back in time to get inside before the temperature dropped, they froze right outside the door or if they moved out of their cluster they might not make it back in. Now, because of the short life of a bee, you will expect to lose bees over winter. While they live longer over winter than Spring and Summer, they all won’t last the full winter. What happens in the winter? The bees will cluster together around the queen to keep themselves and the queen warm. They will shiver and such to create heat and heat the hive to around 95 degrees. If it is warm enough and there are enough bees in the cluster to allow it, the outside bees will move to get food on the frames they are on or from other frames in the box or above them (I put the sugar patties right above the cluster on top of the frames) or they will rotate inward with the inside bees and the inside bees will go to the outside which allows for everyone to eat. Unfortunately if the varroa mites have killed too many or there just aren’t enough bees even without a varroa mite issue, they can’t move because that would drop the temperature of the cluster and they will freeze. If there is also brood in the cells, they can’t leave the brood uncovered or it will freeze and die, so they will sacrifice themselves to keep the brood and queen covered. I did have some brood in the frames which tells me that they were very confused as it really was too early for it since it was already capped (which means she laid eggs a couple at least a week before that). Usually, she should be waiting until the end of February to start raising babies. I think the warm temps threw her and the girls for a loop as to the time of the season and how much longer and colder winter would get. Essentially, if they don’t move, they don’t eat and if they don’t eat, they starve. So even though they had plenty of food they probably maybe starved because there simply weren’t enough of them. Although I treated for varroa mites in September, it is possible I could have had issues with mites going into winter and didn’t realize it since they looked healthy and I didn’t see mites or the signs of mites. I had plenty of food in the hive for them as I pulled out 4 frames at least full of honey and they had sugar patties on top of their cluster. So, having enough healthy bees going into winter is a major factor for survival along with enough food.
So, when it was about 65 degrees on January 31st, I went out to check the bees and see if they needed more sugar patties since I had not added any since November. I had wrapped the hive about a week before with some insulation because that was the week we got lots of snow and had really cold temps and I could hear buzzing inside the hive. It was so warm on the day I went into the hive that they should have been out and about which includes doing cleansing flights which allows them to relieve themselves so they don’t develop dysentery which can also wipe them out. But to my disappointment, nobody was around. I opened the hive hoping to see a lovely cluster of happy bees that didn’t mind that I was there. No such luck. I found small clusters on the inside of the two frames that included my queen, but they were all dead. There were bees with their heads in cells which I have read means either they were trying to find food in those empty cells or they were trying to keep warm. Either way, their efforts were unsuccessful. I also found a huge pile of bees in the bottom of the hive that had fallen out of the cluster at some point. It was devastating! I felt somewhat better knowing that I lost my first hive to a probable swarm which means I didn’t kill them, they just left. But here I had a complete dead out. I am still really sad. While I did all I knew to do, I couldn’t save them. Here is the part where I would love to tell you that I found a silver lining in all of this when I was able to put their deaths to good use to give my chickens a nice treat. But nope, I can’t. I didn’t even think of that option. Just dumped them out onto the ground. Later I determined that the yellow dog had found himself a treat of dead bees, but that wasn’t exactly the plan so it doesn’t count.
I did not bring the hive out of the apiary and put it in the garage right away. I took the honey bound frames and harvested one for us and put the rest in the freezer for the new bees on the Spring. The frames that had the cluster still had some bees in the cells that I couldn’t shake out and still had some pollen and what looked like fresh nectar. So, I left those in the hive box because I had some bees follow me up to the house and they were very interested in these frames and I wanted them to clean them out for me. I went down to the box a couple of days later when again, it was warm and there were at least 50 bees robbing the place. What does this mean? No, unfortunately it doesn’t mean that all my bees really didn’t die, it means that there are bees in the area! Possibly the bees from my other hive…at least that is what I am telling myself. Considering we haven’t had any bees up here before, the fact that there were bees now is great! Maybe I will find their new hive and put them back into a box this Spring! That is probably not realistic, but I can hope and dream. One of the reasons we got bees in the first place was to pollinate our orchard. I am hopeful that we will be able to get the new bees in before our orchard starts to flower, however, if we don’t, we will be in the same position we were in last year (are you getting the whole deja vu theme, yet?). If the orchards starts flowering before we the bees I will hopefully be able to borrow a hive from my mentor just to pollinate the orchard. I am taking a page from the Hubs and have decided the best way to improve my apiary is to double the size! So, I have ordered four nucs this year rather than just two. We have also ordered two new honey supers, one of which we have received and put together! It is a brand new invention that we hard of last year out of Australia. We got in on it when it started an Indigogo launch. It is called FlowHive. It is new because it allows you to harvest honey from your super without opening and disturbing the bees. It is a great concept and hopefully it will work! If you are interested in seeing it in action, you can find Flowhive on youtube and on the internets. If it works like it is supposed to, that means easier and quicker harvesting and more honey!
With loss comes learning, right? I will be doing some things differently this year, including keeping only one deep brood box instead of two. I will have hives in full sun in the orchard and down by the pond. I will have a couple with screened bottom boards (which are supposed to help lessen the number of small hive beetles and varroa mites) rather than all solid ones. I will treat for mites more times going into winter rather than just once in the fall and will use a couple of methods. I will also be using (assuming we get it built in time) a horizontal hive. Instead of putting boxes of frames on top of each other and building up, you put frames horizontally inside a long box and build, that’s right, horizontally. I will use bigger feeders to start so I don’t have to refill quart jars every other day. I probably won’t be going into the bees as often as I know what I am looking for and what I am seeing at this point for the most part. I will not give up on becoming a successful beekeeper; it will just take a bit longer!
So as not to end the post on a sad note, lets talk about the garden and chickens!
I am sure you remember that previously I killed the grass to expand the garden. When we had some warmish, dry weather, we were able to plow that area to prepare it for planting (when I say “we”, I really mean the Hubs). We also had to take down Jake’s tree. It was a tree right at the corner of the garden that made mowing around the garden difficult and just made sense to take down. Why is it called Jake’s tree? It was a great shade tree and he loved to sit under it. Make sense? Of course what part of preparing it means is getting all of the large rocks that come up after plowing out of the area so we can put in the mushroom compost and manure. So we (in this instance I actually do mean both of us) last Saturday doing just that and we filled the bed of the RT twice full of rocks. Have I mentioned that we have a lot of rock up here? We also put in some post holes so we can put better corner posts around the garden and we put in the post holes for the orchard fencing. The Hubs spent Saturday cutting down some pine and cedar trees closer to the house and we now have a nice big burn pile again. We will use the cedar logs for posts and I will use the pine needles once dried out in the bee smoker. I will also be attempting to start some green pepper plants this weekend with seeds that I kept from our peppers from this summer. I have never started any plants, so we will see how that goes!
I know you are just on the edge of your seat wondering about the chickens! Well, it seems they are on an egg laying strike. We are currently lucky if we get 7 eggs a day right now. Really, I just want some consistency, ladies. Hopefully the naturally longer days will motivate them. At least my one chicka that was the last to complete her molt is pretty well finished. She has filled in quite nicely. We haven’t had to muck out the run this year as of yet as we haven’t had as bad of a winter as last year. Yay! We have put down some straw in the run just once, but for the most part it has remained pretty dry. The barrel heater for the water has worked like a charm! No frozen water! We are still only filling feeders once per week and still have a mix of higher/regular protein food. Once this barrel of food is empty, we will go back to all regular protein food as they don’t need the extra protein anymore. Why does it matter? Well, extra protein if they don’t need it to help regrow feathers and such can lead to becoming egg bound which we don’t want. No need to create problems!
So the homestead is ready to rock and roll come Spring! We will be keeping tabs on when the co-op gets in new chicks so we can add to our flock so that the newbies will be laying when it comes time to cull the older ones. We are thinking of Black Australorps this time-no issue with telling these girls apart from the rest! If you aren’t the chicken expert and don’t know what these beauties look like, fear not my friends, here’s a look:
Pretty aren’t they? They will be a nice addition. They are an Australian breed that is a dual purpose breed like the ones we have and also lay brown eggs. Oh and in case you were wondering, the Limoncello that I made last month turned out to be outstanding! My mom has even asked me to make a batch for her! Maybe I will start selling it. You know, just in case my beekeeping career doesn’t take off.
Have I told how ready I am for Spring? How much I prefer warm weather? Just in case you weren’t listening before, I am ready for Spring. That is all.
Have a great day!