Early October
October Blog
Fall is here and there is a litany of things a beekeeper has to do. The most important things are probably ensuring the mite load in each hive is at a level that allows the bees to survive and probably equally important is that they have enough honey to get through the winter. Those are the big things, but the smaller things like hive winterization, bear fencing, queen and population evaluation, and configuring honey and brood frames in the brood box; these are things that can set the bees up to either thrive or die.
This week I am starting to configure each hive based on the way I’m overwintering them. I have two types of hives – production hives and double nucleus hives. Production hives are big, strong hives that have produced honey and nucleus hives, or nucs (pronounces nukes) are typically newer, smaller hives that will become production hives the following year or be sold to new beekeepers. For most of the production hives, I am trying a new way to overwinter and that is to use a single deep box, instead of the way it’s typically done in Maine which is in a double deep configuration. I’ve done a lot of research on this and am hoping this to be an efficient way to send the hives through winter.
Today when I was inspecting and arranging hives I started condensing double boxes into singles (see the most recent video), taking the honey frames from the upper box, putting them into the lower box then removing the top box. As I mentioned in my last post, hives in Maine will need approximately 80-100 pounds of honey for the winter. Since I don’t have a hive scale I ensure the frames are full of honey, I also pick up the box to get an approximate idea of the weight. It’s not an exact method, but I have an insurance policy I use to make sure my bees don’t starve – sugar. Bees will eat the sugar that I leave above the brood box after they eat the honey. The sugar is hygroscopic which means that it can absorb condensation that could drip on the winter cluster of bees and kill them, so the sugar not only acts as a food source, but a sponge.
But back to October. If there isn’t enough of a fall nectar flow, or if I harvest the fall honey then I have to feed the bees to get the hives up to weight. Fall feeding is done with a 2:1 sugar to water mixture put into a hive top feeder or by open feeding. The bees will take the sugar water in their honey stomachs and deposit it into open honeycomb, then dry the sugar water to below 20% moisture and put a wax cap over the cell. I add a very small amount of ascorbic acid to the sugar water solution to get the pH down to approximately 4 which is the pH of nectar. The cutoff deadline of fall feeding in Maine is mid to late October.
Mite treatments in October will be done using oxalic acid. The reason is that there is little to no new brood in the hives by mid-October and oxalic acid treatments are cost effective, safe and efficacious. Oxalic acid is sublimated by heating it and this disperses it throughout the hive where it then crystallizes into formic acid. Formic acid is found in many of the foods we eat. This acid destroys the feet on the verroa mites so that they can’t attach to the honeybee. I’ll have a cool video of how this treatment is done later this month.