La Casa Grande Colectiva

Tag: winter

  • What do bees do in the winter?

    Hives on a sunny winter day
    Unless you have a beehive in your backyard, you don’t see a lot of honeybees during Winter.  In order to survive the long cold between flower blooms, the whole colony balls up inside of the hive and conserves heat by rubbing against one another.  This mass of bees starts at the bottom of the hive and moves up the center eating all the honey.  If they built up enough of a stockpile and the beekeeper didn’t take it all in the Fall, there will be enough to last till the Spring bloom.  We didn’t harvest any honey last Fall, in fact Robby added an extra box of honey for the weaker of the two colonies (note the white box).

    Another factor that helps the bees survival over the Winter is death.  The population of the hive drops dramatically from 50,000+ at the peak, all the way down to a few thousand.  This greatly reduces the rate at which the colony consumes the honey stores.

    Bottom board covered in dead bees

    Of course, with fewer workers around general hive cleaning maintenance is neglected, and the bottom board becomes a mass open grave.  The bodies pile up next to puddles of excrement almost blocking the hive entrance.

    On nice sunny Winter days some activity can be viewed around the hives. These photos were taken when the temperature was hovering around freezing, but the sun was thawing some of the accumulated snow. Bees were peaking out of the hole in the hive.

    Bees peaking through a hole

    I sat and watched with my camera, eager to see where the bees were venturing out to, and for what purpose.

    Bee crawling through the snow

    The purpose of her flight quickly became obvious.  After scurrying around along the surface of the snow for a few minutes, this bee keeled over and died.

    dead bee in the snow

    Perhaps in a selfless act, she sacrificed herself so the rest of the colony could have enough to eat and survive.  Or perhaps she was denied access to the honey stores and escaped only to find the cold white doom outside.

    A lot of what I’ve read about beekeeping suggests thinking about the entire colony as one living organism, and each bee, while performing a specific set of tasks, functions as the tissues and organs.  So, like a bear who hibernates through Winter, the hive emerges in the Spring leaner, and eager to build up and stockpile of food. While thousands of dead bees littered around the hive seems grim, it is all part of the process of seasonal regeneration.

  • Bee update from R. Nagel

    Bees bees bees

     

    Robert wrote an update on the beehives on his blog.  Here’s the whole thing.

    ”

    Well last weekend (November 2) the temperature was fairly warm, the sun was shining, and the wind was lazily blowing. It was a good time to check the hives and I will be periodically checking the weak hive throughout the winter. Unfortunately, due to the late season swarm that took place in late July I believe, on hive has no food. And by no food I mean the hive has no honey.

    Bees spend all summer preparing for winter. In the warm growing season they gather pollen and nectar from almost every plant within about a 2 mile radius and take it back to the hive and store it in the honey comb. By fanning their wings, they turn the nectar to honey by evaporating the water. Once the honey comb is full, it is capped with a white wax and left alone. Unless the bees decide to swarm. When the bees decide to swarm, they are dividing the colony in two and sending much of their honey stock to the new colony. This means that the honey is lost when the bees swarm.

    When the one hive swarmed, they lost not only lots of honey, but also the queen. I’m not sure what happened, but without a queen and her guiding pheromones to control the worker bees, many of them simply stayed in the hive and ate honey. So instead of gathering at least 120 pounds of honey for winter, the bees had nothing.

    SDC13808Some bees gathered on some frames discussing where the best flowers of C-U.

    So this means I have to probably once every couple weeks go to the hive and give them some sugar syrup. I can make sugar syrup by mixing two parts sugar to one part water with some heat. A problem is that the syrup could freeze and the bees might not be able to get to it. Another problem could be that the sugar syrup stays too long in the container and goes bad before its all eaten.

    Amazingly the hive stays relatively warm in winter. Although the outside temperature may drop to many degrees below zero, the core of the hive maintains a temperature of more than 90 degrees fahrenheit. The bees do this by clustering and then slowly circulating. Bees that have been on the outside of the cluster slowly move in towards the warmer middle and bees from the warm center slowly move outward. The queen, of course, is always the center of attention.

    But without any honey, the bees have no energy to produce heat and the hive may freeze and/or starve to death. This would be pretty depressing so I am going to try my best to give the bees all they need to eat.

    ”