As soon as the summer solstice passes, bees in temperate climates start shifting into winter preparation mode. The further the season wears on, the more urgently they'll try to pack away food, and the less likely they are to do frivolous things like swarm or build new comb by consuming precious honey.
Your bees have been getting ready for winter for some time already, but what should you be doing now as colder weather nears?
Check autumn blooms, and start feeding
How are your late summer and early fall blooms going? Not sure? Go for a walk or a drive and study the fields and roadside ditches around your bees to see whether they're full of blooming goldenrod and Japanese knotweed, or other autumn nectar-producers. Both blooms are carrying on here around Betterbee headquarters, but last year the goldenrod bloom was mostly a bust. Drought can weaken the plants so that they don't make much nectar, or the open blooms can be rained on and the nectar will be washed right out of them. A sudden early frost can even kill the plants when their flowers are just buds, and your bees will be denied a big portion of their fall crop.
When this happens, it's time to feed your bees. Offering your bees sugar syrup allows them to pack on extra weight to get ready for winter. If you know you'll have to feed your bees syrup, it's quite nice to do so when the weather is warm and the bees can quickly evaporate out excess water. The colder it gets, the harder is is for the bees to process syrup, until eventually it will be too cold for them to do it at all.
Want to learn more about feeding and feeders? Check out this article that gives a rundown of all of your feeder options.
You can also check out this "Red Alert" video that we released on YouTube when the fall nectar flow was very poor and we wanted people to start feeding their bees ASAP. (Don't forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel if you like the video!)
Weigh your options
If you don't know how heavy your hives are, you might want to start weighing them soon to gauge how much feed or extra honey they'll need to get through winter. Here at Betterbee, we aim to have a whole hive (boxes, frames, honey, and bees) weigh about 130 or 135 pounds going into the winter. Lighter hives are fed aggressively, and heavier hives may have a honey frame or two stolen and distributed to the poorer hives in the apiary.
Some beekeepers will simply "heft" their hives to judge their weight, trying to estimate which hives are light enough that they need to be fed. Just by tilting a hive up, you can estimate its weight. (Make sure the hives you heft are strapped together because you don't want to tilt a hive and have some of the boxes fall off!)
A ladder, a pole, some nylon straps, and a hanging scale will allow you to weigh your hives and decide who needs to be fed. We recommend buying a digital scale that will record the weight it just measured, or else you'll be trying to read the scale while you hold the hive up on your shoulder!
Betterbee also carries the BroodMinder hive monitoring system, which includes a scale that can help you judge weight gain in your hives over time. However, this scale is only useful for the hive that is sitting on the scale, and it would be a pricey proposition to put one of these scales under all ten of the hives in your apiary.
A much sleeker option recently entered the market for those that want a portable hive scale that will let them weigh all the hives in their apiary quickly and accurately. Betterbee is excited to be the U.S. source for the Hivetronics Portable Hive Scale 2.0. The ruggedly-engineered scale slides underneath your hives and then reports the weight to your Bluetooth-enabled smartphone.
Keep pests out
The more that your bees store away for the winter, the more valuable their hive becomes to pests and predators who want to steal from them. One common foe of winter colonies is mice, and it may be worthwhile to install mouse guards on your hives now to keep house-hunting autumn mice from sneaking into your hives in late fall and making a mess of things until the bees chase them out in spring. No matter which mouse guard option you choose, your bees won't mind if you install it a little early. It's much better to be a week early than a week late because late installation runs the risk of trapping a mouse inside the hive, which can end very badly whenever the weather warms up again and the bees start guarding their space.
Other pests pose a threat even before the cold weather arrives. Specifically, as the last nectar-bearing flowers fade, the honey in your hives may be targeted by other honey bees, as well as various species of wasps. Yellowjacket populations grow and grow all summer, so fall weather coincides with lots of wasps with nothing better to do than invade your colonies to steal honey (as well as brood). A single yellowjacket will win in a fight against a single guard bee, so the wasps can usually come and go through the hive without much obstruction.
Another threat to your hives is foragers from other colonies. Both your own hives and your neighbor's hives will start poking around the entrances of weaker colonies nearby. If a colony is weak enough that the robbers can sneak past the guards (or deplete them in a fight) then a stronger colony will invade and rob a weaker colony in force. Reducing your entrances with standard entrance reducers can help, but a robber screen increases the security of your hives. Robbers are attracted to the honey smells coming from the screened hive entrance, and don't notice the "secret" entrance that the resident bees quickly learn to use.
To fight robber bees, you can consider a robber screen in either plastic or wood and metal. Robber screens may be enough to exclude yellowjackets too, but many beekeepers with serious robbing or wasp problems in the fall are reporting great success in keeping wasps out by using the HiveGate entrance system. The long, narrow tunnel reduces the space that the bees have to guard, and forces wasps (and robber bees) to run a gauntlet of guard bees before they ever get onto the combs.
Final thoughts on preparing to prepare your hives for winter
Hopefully, this pre-pre-winter checklist will help you prepare to be prepared. We'll have more articles (and YouTube videos) on winter preparations in the coming weeks and months, but we wanted to get the wheels turning on some important winter preparations that you may want to start thinking about today.
