March was sunny and warm but nights are now distinctly cooler indicating that winter is almost here. The countryside looks fairly dry with only a covering of short green grass. From a bee's eye view, everything looks bleak with very little flowering so they have settled into winter mode.

However around the cities it's a different story and nature seems to be playing games with them. The warm settled March weather has stimulated a number of scrubs and trees to continue flowering. Kermadec Island Pohutukawa (and even some of the NZ species have the odd bunch of flowers), Bottlebrush, Grevilleas, Eucalyptus, the odd Magnolia, and all the blue flowers such as Lavender and Rosemary are flowering. This has in turn triggered some hives into a massive build-up, converting winter stores into brood.

No doubt these hives will winter well provided they are given addition honey to winter over on. An alternative is to feed sugar syrup now so they can convert it into stores.

To feed a hive, replace an outside frame with an internal division board feeder. Put a good handful of dry pig fern inside to prevent the bees drowning in the liquid. Mix the sugar solution as thick as possible (2 white sugar to one of warm water by volume) and fill the feeder as well as dribbling a trail of syrup over the top of the frames so the bees follow it to the feeder. The bees can take up 2-3 kg a day so continue to feed until most of the honey super is full. Likewise, one can use a top or Miller feeder.

If you do not have a feeder, place a mat (sacking or similar) over the top super and cut a 75-mm in the center. Take a jar or a honey pail and punch 6-8 tiny holes in the lid, fill with syrup, and place the upturned container over the hole in the mat. Initially a small amount of syrup will dribble out until gravity and the vacuum within the container, equalise. Place an empty super on top to enclose the feeder within the hive, place a few matches on the top edges of the spare super to give top ventilation and pop the lid on top to seal the hive from robber bees.

If you don't have any feeding devices at all, pour the syrup into a plastic bag and seal it tightly. Lay this on top of the frames inside the hive and make a small hole in the upper surface of the bag. Press down until a small pool if syrup has formed. The bees will find this and as they climb over the bag, more syrup will be released until very little is left. After that they tend to chew at the bag so it will have to be replaced if more feeding is necessary.

It's not a good idea to use a bodman external feeder (a jar at the entrance) as the syrup cools too quickly and the bees will not take it in during the cold nights.

Feeding is best done in the evening as it tends to excite the bees and they will fly everywhere looking for the source of nectar. If you have to feed during the day, dribble a little syrup at the entrance to stop the bees flying but not too much to encourage robbing.

The easiest way to mix white sugar into a syrup is to fill a container 7/8 full of sugar, then pour in boiling water stirring all the time until the container is full and the sugar dissolved.

If you use Fumidil B, add a level teaspoon to 2.5 gallons of syrup to help control Nosema. If you haven't, then don't worry about it. The rotation of 3 brood frames each year plus good, dry, sunny, sheltered apiary sites will minimise the affect of the protozoa.

For the odd hive that feels a bit light, I also add an additional 2kg-honey container of raw sugar into the top feeder. The sugar takes in moisture and provides an emergency store for the bees. If they don't require it, they will ignore it until spring. I also add the odd frame of granulated honey I have held back in the garage to supplement some hives. These are OK, provided the bees have easy access to water to break down the glucose crystals otherwise they are tossed out the front of the hive.

Wintering Before putting your frames away for the winter it pays to clean them up. Old dark brood frames should be put aside for melting down. As a rule when you hold a frame up to the sun and can't see light through it, render it down. Any with broken lugs, badly distorted wax should also be put aside. I don't believe in eliminating all of the drone comb from my hives for two reasons. I breed my own queens and therefore need quite a few drones in each apiary and with drone comb in the hives, you can quickly get an indication of the nutritional levels in a hive. That is, when there is an excess of pollen and nectar, they start to produce drones. Some hives seem to produce drones well ahead of the rest in an apiary. These hives quite often are the first to swarm, so I mark them and then split before they have a chance to do this.

Back to sorting frames. I also clean all the propolis off the frames. Propolis from the top bars is kept separate from that from the sides of the end bars as it contains less wax and is therefore worth more. Apart from gaining additional revenue from the propolis, frames that are to go into the brood, nest next year should be clean. They are designed to give 33-mm spacing between the centers of frames. Propolis and wax on the edges of the end bar increases this distance therefore more bees are required to fill the bee space and keep the brood warm. Frames in the brood nest should be cramped together to form a close unite. It's more economical for the bees. However, I have also read that spacing them out requires more bees to keep the brood warm and therefore helps to discourage swarming. I prefer that the extra bees cluster on the two outside frames in the brood supers (9 to the super). Take your pick as to what works for you.

When stacking away frames for the winter, I sort the individual frames in each super by putting the lighter coloured frames to the outside of the super. That way, if a moth lays its eggs along the outside of the stack, the young larvae have to travel a long way in before find dark frames to feed on. This also means I don't have to sort frames when they are put on again for next season's flow. Darker frames (those that have had one or two brood cycles) are more attractive to bees and encourages them up into the honey super. I do not scrape off the wax along the bottom bars, as this tends to form a bridge to encourage the bees up into the super as well.

If the supers are put away before the first frost, add a little PDB to kill moths as explained last month's article.

April Management: winter down hives, BL check, slope of bottom boards for water drainage (3 degrees sloping to the front) and restrict entrances to prevent mice entering. Check hive foundations, replace any rotten or damaged supers and floors, check fences, store extracted honey supers and fumigate for wax moth. Control the grass around the hives and keep an eye out for wasp nest.

Time to plan for next season. Order spring queens, and woodware early and avoid disappointment. However, be aware that no matter how hard the queen breeder try in the spring, if the conditions are not right, (three days at 20 Deg C), the queens won't mate and can hang around for weeks. Not like February when conditions are warm and settled and they will fly and mate within three days of emerging.

Now when all the work is done, site back and review the season. Where did you go wrong? Hives swarmed, hives built up on the flow instead of before it. Get everything right with basic management (young queen, lots of bees and food (pollen is essential), add supers before they are needed and then its down to timing.

Learn what triggers swarming. For some it's broom after rain, for me it tends to coincide with the flowering of the cabbage trees. Act to prevent it. Cutting out cells just upsets a hive. Hives should be artificially swarmed (by creating a nuc) if they look likely to swarm. Learn the dates of your main flow and work back from that date. Maximum production of brood should have started 9-12 weeks before the flow starts. If nothing is flowering at that time, then consider stimulating the hives with sugar syrup and feeding pollen frames. It takes a few years to learn an area. Conditions can also vary within a few kilometers as microclimates come into play.

Once you know the local conditions, then you overlay the La Nino / El Nino weather conditions and how each of these affect your area. One produces more westerly winds with rain on the west, drought on the east. Hives on North slopes don't do as well as those on southern sheltered sites and when the oscillation changes the opposite can happen. It's important for beekeepers to know in advance what the weather will be like in the September to December period. This is the most critical time of the year when hives are building towards swarming, queens are getting mated and food stores reach a minimum. If we have an idea of what might happen in the spring, we can change our feeding and swarm prevention plans to match weather conditions. Sometimes it's all a bit of a mystery.

Some of my city hives swarmed in February after they had already produced a crop (probably because they were under-supered as I had already put all my supers out). It's inconvenient to neighbours and a slur on my beekeeper to have hives swarm, so I'm considering clipping the queen's wings in these apiaries and extracting the crop off these apiaries a little earlier. At least if they try to swarm, they won't be able to without a queen, so the bees will return to the hive. Hopefully I'll be around in the next few days to discover this before the bees try again, or I will have been informed by the landowner that something was amiss with the hives. So I have hunted out some New Zealand research on the topic to stimulate the brain cells.