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Wellington Beekeepers Association Inc. About the Apiary - July 1996 |
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July 96 Well, we have just passed the shortest day and apart from two spells where we received a few days of hail, where is our winter? The rest of the country seems to be having their’s with snow in the Southern Alps and the middle of the North Island, but so far it seems to have passed us by. We just experienced nine days of mild weather, very little wind, with an average temperature of 14oC. What has this done for the bees? Well they are out gathering winter and early spring sources that have come into bloom: tree lucerne, eucalyptus, kohekohe, banksia, spring bulbs, etc. In the first few apiaries I visited last week, I thought it was just their location (close to flowering sources) that had stimulated them to fly, however, it seems all but the shady hives had broken cluster and were busy with activity. It also surprised me just how much brood there was in the hives. Young queens had brood on 3-5 frames where old queens were struggling to lay on two frames. (Why was I looking in the brood nest during winter? - unfortunately I’m still removing the crop so was inspecting for BL. One apiary to go now, and then its back to the saw bench making up more gear for the spring. And if you think I’m late, I rang around a few beekeepers trying to get information for our July Conference Seminar and quite a few of the commercial beekeepers are still extracting too. A bigger extractor next year will speed things up considerably.) Well, back to the bees, they are really motoring and have used up quite a bit of feed producing all this brood - some as much as half a super. Surprising to me was they are also storing the nectar around the brood nest and in the upper frames. They even built wax between the escape boards and the top bars on hives where I left them overnight. (I ran out of time to remove all the honey of one apiary, so inspected the brood put on an escape board to save me blowing them out in the morning). They work well - not a bee left in the supers. The only problem is that the supers had cooled and were damp so will require some heat and drying before extracting. I’m also lucky in that most of my supers were new last year and therefore the honey is very slow to granulate in them. The only problem with all this activity, is when winter really does arrive, the bees will have to maintain the brood nest at 32oC and this will require a lot of honey. So come September the hives will be either bursting with bees, ready to swarm in October, or will be on the verge of starvation. Only time and weather will tell. I’ll be checking my hives in August to see if they require supplementary feeding. (Most shouldn’t as I have left them with three high ready to split in the spring). If you left your bees a little light and they are flying well, I suggest you check out how much food honey they have left. Wear something heavy to stop being stung. Their stings seem to grow longer in winter as they easily go through the suit and a light shirt. If the hive is down to the last three frames of honey, feed them sugar syrup as thick as possible for a week or two until they have stores in most of the top super. Allow extra ventilation so the moisture can easily escape and close the lid down again after you have finished feeding. That should last them for a month or two with luck. |
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