I had been using this empty hive as a bait hive, hoping to catch a swarm from – no luck there – and I had just left this outside the garage. I had meant to put it inside the garage, but you know how that goes.
Then that night Charlie Pup was barking at the window looking towards the garage, and i figured she was barking at a shadow.
But then come morning I see some animal has taken the empty hive apart. Luckily it wasn’t too broken up. There was a mix of wax foundation and plastic foundation frames that hadn’t been drawn out yet.
Can’t say this was a bear, it may have been a raccoon or skunk, but it reminds me not to leave beekeeping gear outside anymore.
Another of our Beekeeping 101 videos on how to do a winter bee inspection. Links to more beekeeping videos at end of the post. This time we open up the beehives in late March to show us feeding bees in winter. Keeping bees in areas with snow and winter, you will want to add sugar cakes, aka fondant, in the winter, and then add protein patties in late winter – early spring to get the honeybees going early.
You can open a beehive if its above 40F to do a quick winter bee inspection, if its in the 30sF, you can open it real quick to put some sugar on the top of the hive. Do not take the hive apart for a full inspection. We are just taking off the outer and inner cover, and looking in from the top of the hive real quick. The faster you do this the better, I think.
Honeybees may not always crawl up to the top and show themselves, they may still be clustered in a lower super, so just leave them that way. If you come across a dead hive, as we did, my suggestion is to leave the hive be, tape up the entrances, and clean out the hive when it warms up. You tape the entrances closed to keep the wax moths from moving in as spring approaches.
Dead Bees near sugar cake
Why did my bees die? Its not always obvious. Condensation is a big winter killer, but since we switched to the insulated inner covers we built, click for the insulated inner cover post, we have not had a condensation problem in the beehives in winter. Every year we have had a beehive die in winter, it is hard to get them all through winter. So when a hive dies, don’t blame yourself if you have done the following:
We pulled the inner cover on our biggest hive, and it was not easy this time. The honeybees had sealed it pretty tight with propopolis, a waxy resin that bees collect from trees.
bees seal shut the inner cover with this waxy resinthis stuff makes it take some work to open the top of the hive
I was watching our hives last week, and thought Hive #1 was looking less busy at the entrance. I was thinking it had swarmed. So we opened up the hive, and found our marked queen, which means the hive had not swarmed. ( When a hive swarms, the original queen flies off with half of the honeybees ) But we did find lots of drone cells and 3 queen cells that are being built. We removed the queen cells, but I know we can’t stop them from swarming that way. We are going to do a split to reduce the hive population, and remove any more queen cells.
We just received the queens we ordered from Jennifer Berry, so we have to do this quickly. Its best to do splits in May, I understand, but this being early June I think we’ll be ok.
Our original queen is still in the hive, so it has not swarmed yet. The queen is the bee with the blue mark. the beginning of a queen cell among drone cellshere are 2 queen cells being built at the bottom of a frame
