Part Seven: Preparing for Winter

Cheesin’ with our hives in their winter setups (with feeders on for now)!

We're glad that the chaos of the past couple of months has settled, but we’re also sad that our bees are slowing down for the year. After getting home from work, I usually walk out and stand next to the hives, watching the bees fly in and out, with or without their pollen pants on. Now, I’m lucky if I see four or five stragglers hanging out on the front porch. With the colder weather comes quiet hives, and I've never been great with silence!

Spotting Kha-bee-si II in all her glory

In early September, we did a full hive inspection of Kha-bee-si II to gauge how she's doing before setting her up for winter. She's crushing the game! We found fresh eggs, brood, and capped brood in the middle three frames of the bottom-most box, surrounded by frames of pollen and capped honey. The second and third box had more frames of brood (with five frames in the uppermost box filled with capped brood!). Tim located our unmarked queen in the second box and she’s chubby, long, and laying like a pro! This was the first time we’ve seen her in the flesh, so this made our day!

The top, fourth box still only had two drawn frames. We took some of the empty, extracted frames from Big Girl and placed them in Kha’s top box, hoping to get some movement going. She’ll need all four boxes full of resources for overwintering.

Putting both hives in their winter setups

This katydid (leaf bug) wanted to hitch a ride on our smoker fuel out to the bee yard!

We were ambitious in thinking that we could rearrange both hives and get them ready for winter in one afternoon. We are so slow at manipulating frames (we care a lot about not squishing bees) that this would have been a marathon hive inspection, and the bees would have been very irritated, so we focused on getting Big Girl set up first.

The deep boxes she came in were banged up on the edges, with extra, unwanted entrances on some of the corners, so we replaced the boxes with newer woodenware. We then went in and cleaned off sticks, burr comb, and other debris from each frame. The Big Girl winter setup consists of two deeps and a medium super filled with frames of honey and pollen.

We panicked as we placed Big Girl’s outer cover on and realized we didn’t locate any eggs… or a queen. When I asked my Betterbee coworkers, they said that the queen might be slowing down a bit with the laying, and that there likely were eggs, just fewer of them, so they would be harder to see. I trusted the process.

Tim uses the digital hanging scale to weigh Big Girl (syrup-free at this point!).

A couple days later, Tim went back in solo to prepare Kha-bee-si II, and when he checked on Big Girl, he found eggs! Hooray! He took the remaining drawn-out frames of honey and pollen from Big Girl and placed them in the outer positions of all of the boxes in Kha, since she didn’t draw out all the way to the edges of each box.

Weighing the hives

Both hives are in their winter setups! We decided to weigh them using a digital hanging scale to gauge how they’re doing on winter stores. We weighed each hive by placing the scale on first the front, then the back, end of each hive, and adding the two weights together. Kha rang in at 131.6 lb. and Big Girl was at 128.3 lb.! If you asked me about 6 weeks ago, I never would’ve guessed that our little package of bees that swarmed and had to rebuild would weigh more than our massive adopted hive… but, in all fairness, some of Kha’s weight did come from Big Girl’s extra frames of honey and pollen. 

Final thoughts

All in all, we are extremely proud of our girls. Our next focus is on lowering mite counts down to nearly none (or none, in a perfect world) for successful overwintering, likely using oxalic acid as either a drip or vaporization. We’re also planning to set up some wind barriers to protect them from the frigid winds blowing off the Hudson. Update: Mite counts for Big Girl were off the chart after our most recent check, so we administered our first oxalic acid vaporization treatment this past weekend. We're hoping that, between the Formic Pro treatments and the oxalic treatment(s), we'll get these numbers under control prior to the harsh winter. Personally, I'm not looking forward to not seeing my girls flying around outside the hives. They were out a little when the sun was shining and it was just about 50 degrees, but we're going to turn a corner soon. I'm dreading it!

As a side note: I had the pleasure of attending Apimondia in Montreal in early September, learning how different countries keep bees and how different countries are exploring innovative ways of keeping Varroa destructor mites at bay. This only increased my appreciation for these little pollinators and their worldwide influence.

Your Betterbee-ginner Beekeeper,
Quinn