This was article supposed to
be something about how honey bees and beekeepers deal with winter and it
was to appear in late September, just in time to be early enough to think
about winter and actually do something about it before it actually got
here, for a change.
But Neil wanted
something sooner than that. And a late August time frame is a bit too
early to be worrying about wind screens, entrance reducers and adequate
ventilation. Criminey, it’s still hot out there. Winter is a cool, damp
distant dream.
Instead, right now
is the perfect time to make a conscious
effort to begin the too-often-overlooked chore of taking care of the bees, that take care of the bees,
that do go into winter. That’s a three generation leap if you think about
it. There are a lot of parallels in regular life that use similar rules.
I’ll give you a for
instance. Right now the tomato plants in my garden are just beginning to
show signs of late blight, an insidious disease that takes out tomato
plants later in the summer. If I let the plants go and they collapse and
die right there in the garden, all the inoculum that collects on the dead
tissues of the plant, now decomposing in the soil, lie dormant for a year
or more, waiting to strike next season when the right environment and a
host plant are ready. But at the first sign of infection, if I
remove and destroy infected plants by burning them, I’ve stopped further
infestations in their tracks.… my proactive treatment saves future
season’s plants, and takes anything resembling a necessary chemical
treatment out of the equation.
The same goes for
fire blight on apple trees. Once observed, it can be removed and stopped
from spreading further in the original tree and on to other trees in the
orchard. No chemicals needed, and no further outbreaks expected.
So, too, for your
bees. If you do your homework now, before winter, when it finally arrives
all the preparation pieces are in place and your bees have everything they
need, long before they need it.
Start with making
sure the bees in the boxes today are healthy. Of course the biggest
problem honey bees have is that pesky varroa mite. If you’ve been on top
of things all summer you have been keeping the mite population in check by
routinely trapping and removing them in drone brood; plus, you have a
screened bottom board so when a mite gets brushed off a bee it falls
through the bottom and away from the bees; and you’ve and dusted your
colonies with powdered sugar most every time you have checked the bees all
summer long. Those three pest management techniques work remarkably well
and will generally keep mite populations manageable in an otherwise
healthy hive. The only other necessary task is to make sure that mite
population is reasonable…
And here’s where
things can get tricky. You need to monitor mite populations during the
summer anyway, just to make sure they aren’t getting out of hand, or that
something weird hasn’t happened. You do that with a sticky board placed
under your screened bottom board. Most screened bottom boards come with a
slot under the screen to slide in a piece of cardboard with "goo’em"
on it so when mites fall from above, rather than fall all the way to the
ground, they go through the screen but are trapped in the sticky on the
board, which is below the screen so the bees aren’t trapped in it, too.
There are some numbers you can use to gauge the mite population using this
device… for a full sized colony, no more than a dozen mites a day should
be caught on that sticky board… maybe 15, but more than 20 and you have a
healthy population of mites.
