Beekeeping – Are our Hives Ready for Winter?
In addition to our recent Nosema test and checks for Varroa in our bee hives, we also had Helen, our Mentor, pop around for a quick inspection of the hives so that she could give us her opinion on their strength, or weakness.
3 colonies or 2?
We were fairly confident that Leri, the stronger of the hives, would be fine and that it would be ready for us to to start preparing it for winter. We weren’t so sure about Clettwr, the weaker hive at our house and Syfydrrin that we have moved elsewhere. If Helen thought that these two hives were weak and not really suitable for over-wintering then the plan was to merge them to form one strong colony.
As it happened though Helen seemed to think that Clettwr was strong enough as it was. She was also quite impressed with the strength of Leri and the fact that we had managed to rear queens from swarms and that they all looked healthy. So, it looks as though we shall be attempting to over-winter 3 colonies. So, we now have a plan for the coming months.
Honey from Leri?
Over the next week or so we hope to extract our first crop of honey. We won’t have much, about four frames worth from Leri. We have jiggled the best frames around so that they are in the top super on this hive and have now put the colony on a ‘brood and half’ which is how we’ll overwinter them. This means that rather than keeping the colony in one brood box, you give them a brood box and a super. This gives them more room for stores over the winter and local beekeepers seem to have been having more success with colonies on a brood and a half, so we shall give it a go as well.
Ready for Winter
We will do the same with Clettwr, but as we won’t be removing honey from this hive we have already taken out the queen excluder, leaving them with a brood and half and have started feeding them with a strong sugar solution that they can use to make stores from. the entrance block has already been reduced on this hive as well due to robbing issues we had a few weeks back, so other than keeping them well fed, this hive is now ready for winter.
Drawn Frames
We’ve yet to inspect our third hive this week, but expect it to be the weakest of the three, so will be reducing it down to a brood and a half and will be feeding it too so that the colony can build up sufficient stores to get them through the winter. This colony came from a swarm that was housed in a nuc box so on last inspection had very few drawn frames. We’ll probably therefore replace some of the undrawn frames with drawn ones from another nuc box so that the bees have somewhere to stores the syrup we feed them without having to draw out the frames first.
Lets just hope we don’t have too harsh a winter and that we can get all three up to strength over the next month or so.
