Plain Talk: Stressing Winter Bees (215)

Episode 215 – Plain Talk: Stressing Winter Bees

Jim Tew: Hello again, podcast listeners here at Honey Bee Obscura. Thank you so much for giving me some of your time. I wish that I could tell you that I just had some game-changing topics for you, but actually, all I've got are typical beekeeping anxiety thoughts and potential preparations. If you would, stand by, and let's just chat for a minute, just you and me. Nothing special. Let's just talk about bees. I'm Jim Tew. I come to you once a week here at Honey Bee Obscura, where I talk about something to do with just plain beekeeping.

Introduction: Welcome to Honey Bee Obscura, brought to you by Growing Planet Media, the producers of the Beekeeping Today Podcast. Join Jim Tew, your guide through the complexities, the beauty, the fun, and the challenges of managing honey bees. Jim hosts fun and interesting guests who take a deep dive into the intricate world of honey bees. Whether you're a seasoned beekeeper or just getting started, get ready for some plain talk that'll delve into all things honey bees.

Jim: Listeners here, and-- Can I still say midwinter? It's time. Everything the bees did since last spring, everything I did since last spring, everything I did in the fall in prep, this is why we did it. This is the payoff time. In a perfect world, you have perfect hives. In the real world, you have different hives of different abilities and different histories, and that's what I've been tinkering with. Because I'm not a normal beekeeper, abnormal in many other ways too, I don't always rush to fix what the bees did themselves. I have talked multiple times about a tiny swarm I had that moved in last spring and against all odds set up housekeeping and some equipment that had a pretty good case of wax moths going.

It was an even battle between who gets this hive, the wax moths or the bees. I intervened, probably incorrectly, something you wouldn't do in wildlife behavior normally. I intervened and tried to swing things toward that of the small swarm. I didn't go crazy pilfering from bigger, healthier colonies to build up this small swarm. In reality, the small swarm made a fundamental mistake. I penalized my good colonies for the colony that made the mistake. Having said that, it's like having a runt puppy. What are you going to do with this thing? Throughout the summer, I helped it along and now it's in midwinter and that colony, as you might expect, is in serious trouble.

It brings up the topic that I have discussed and written about for decades. How do you emergency feed in the winter? Secondly, and probably more important than how you do it, is should you do it? That's where I am. That's the reason for the chat, is what do you do when you walk back there and see that this colony is not thriving and that it's got serious future potential issues? Much energy do you invest to it? How much effort and time and money do you put into it? Can't answer that. There's more than one of me that has an opinion on this, and one of me says, "No, don't do it. You're not a young guy anymore.

It's really cold out there. You've got to get that equipment out. You've got to get that little bit of feed on. You've got to go back and check them later on." Another one of me says, "They're going to die. Just cut your losses. This was a mistake they made last spring when that tiny swarm left and took up housing on a very poor location." Could you do that? Could you just walk away? First of all, for weeks now, back since November, I would go back with warm liquid honey and dribble some on the bees. Not a lot. You'll gum them up. I would dribble some on the bees and then I would dribble it up on the inner cover and I put some sticks there so the bees could have a ladder to reach the top of the inner cover.

Then I would put maybe an ounce or two of honey up there. Since I seemed to have nothing else to do, my plan was that I would walk back about once every five days and do this again. I suppose my long-range hope was that from here on, it'd be a mild winter and that it would be easy enough that I could actually open the colony up, maybe put a frame of honey in from somewhere else, something I said I wasn't going to do. I've also said there's more than one of me in here, so one day, one thing that I do is not the same thing that I decide to do the next time I'm out there.

I had to walk back a bit ago, a bit ago being yesterday. They're not in great shape. It's a small cluster. The mechanics of defending itself against 10-degree temperatures outside is just insurmountable, honey or not, for a cluster maybe the size of a softball, maybe bigger. I haven't opened it now since early November. That is just not-- What? Appealing, not rewarding, not fulfilling. Our goal is to keep strong, healthy colonies. They're mite-free. They've gone into winter with good food stores. Everything is in place. The entrance is reduced. [unintelligible 00:06:10]. That's all done. It's all done. That's what we normally expect.

Invariably, we are going to have these things that I've called runt colonies. The one of me who says let them die will then have to argue with the one of me next spring when it's time to clean up this mess. I will reminisce about this small swarm that came in and all that it tried to do to survive. Here it is now, gone to the hive in the sky. It's not going to be a fulfilling ending no matter what. Honestly, listeners, this colony is going to die. Honestly, listeners, even though it's completely impractical, I'm at a stage in life where I could walk back to the colony, to the hive, to the yard periodically and do something.

What I've been doing was feeding honey. I could feed fondant 100 years ago, literally 100 years ago. I went over to a commercial bakery here to their kitchen and I asked the manager what it was that was the cream filling and Oreos and was there any kind of a material like that. He said, "Oh, you want carbs number 52 fondant. I would buy 50-pound blocks of this stuff and come home. It is just heavenly sweet. They think that all it is, it's just donut glaze. I would cut chunks of that and take it back there. It did have some cornstarch in it, which is not great.

I would take a chunk back there about the size of an ice cream sandwich and lay it on there and the bees would tunnel through it. They would cluster all around it and tunnel through it. That helped. You can see dry sugar. They waste a lot of it. They will take dry sugar and they will use it so long as they have access to water. All these things are absolutely desperate. This is you doing what you have to do. This is I doing what I need to do not to feel so guilty next spring when I clean that dead colony up.

Now, for all you people in warm climates who don't have all these 10-degree temperatures and whatever, you can still do this because you too, in your own way, are going to have weak colonies every here and now and then. It's not a situation just for the climate here. The one thing you're going to have a hard time doing because I have tried, is feeding some liquid syrup in the wintertime. It just doesn't work. The bees have to figure out some way to get that water. They have to take the water out of the syrup to get to the sugar. If you've got a technique for feeding bees, let me say in a cold climate, liquid syrup in the winter, I guess I'd like to know how you're doing it.

The most peculiar method I ever saw was all the way back in the late 70s, early 80s, where beekeepers would fill a sandwich bag, maybe a quart, with syrup, close it off tightly, be sure there's no leaks in it, put that sandwich bag on top of the frames, and then cut a slit with a sharp razor in that bag. Some pressure would hold that liquid in the bag, but it would seep and the bees would crawl up on the bag and take the honey from that seeping cut that you made. I have never seen that done before or since. Something about it wasn't popular. I suppose that's a way because, see, the cluster could actually cluster around that bag. Everything seemed to have happened 100 years ago.

I actually devised a feeder that had a tube in it, much like a straw, and my thought was that I would put the feeder up top and then this feeder tube would go down into the cluster and I could feed bees that way. What was wrong with that? The minute that a bee touched that drop hanging off that tube, that drop dropped. With bees all around it feeding on it, they just kept that thing free-flowing. Syrup came out much faster than they could take it, and all I had was some wet bees and about a quart of syrup on the bottom board. I thought it was a nice idea. It was a complete failure.

The conversation I've just had with you is that I have a small colony. It's been small all season. I knew it was going to die, but now that it's time for it to die, I just can't stand by. I'll do all these things, I'll have all these thoughts, I'll talk to you about it, and then probably I'll tell you here in a few weeks that the colony is dead. They don't have the population of bees to fight off the winter. They don't have the population of bees for cluster mechanics. There's just so much that feed and beekeepers can do to help a small colony. Let's hear from our sponsors, and I've got some more dribble that I'd like to bring to you.

[music]

Betterbee: Thinking of splitting your hives this spring? Betterbee's 2025 queens are now available. Choose from Carniolan, Kutik, and Northern Queens, each perfect for different beekeeping needs. Carniolans are gentle, mite-resistant, and adapt well to nectar flows. Kutik's queens raised in South Carolina and New York are strong producers with hygienic traits favored nationwide. For Northern climates, our locally raised queens are winter hardy, disease-resistant, and bred for honey production.

Queens are available for local pickup in Greenwich, New York, or FedEx overnight shipping. Reserve yours today, supplies are limited. Betterbee ships queens Tuesday through Friday only. Terms apply. Visit betterbee.com to learn more.

Jim: That small colony I've been talking about, you can rest assured that it's under stress. What does a bee know? I don't know. What does the colony know as a combined bee unit? What does it instinctually know? I don't know. I would bet that they know that they're in trouble. If they can't maintain the temperature, they don't have the winter resources, I'll bet you that they know that they're in trouble. Here comes Nurse Jim, who's going to do something that's really going to turn this colony around. I will do expertise-type bee things. I will light a smoker, and I will use just the absolute minimum of smoke.

I will open this stress colony, and I will put a frame of honey in that I've taken from another colony that I smoked and stressed to take the frame out of. Then I'll put this frame of cold honey right beside that cluster. They will just weep little bee tears for joy at this sudden surfeit of food. No, they won't. No, listeners, they won't. They're going to go crazy. They're going to view me as an invader. They're going to try to defend the colony. They're going to come flying out. Every bee that flies out of that already pathetically small colony is going to drop to the snow and die there. It's really hard to be helpful.

That colony is under stress, and anything I do to alleviate that colony is just going to stress it more. To help that colony, it's just going to stress it more. I've also dragged in an innocent bystander hive that didn't do anything wrong, that collected honey and made preparations for the winter, and now I'm pilfering it to give it to the little colony that couldn't take it. In this case, colony stress is a fact of life. Isn't stress for all of us and bees a fact of life? I'd like to think there's good stress and bad stress, and that the good stress you just can't get enough of. What is good stress? In my case, it's a good nectar flow going on, and I don't have supers ready.

You run around getting supers together. Good stress is a swarm that's 10 feet up. You wish it was 6 feet up, but I do have a 10-foot ladder that just might reach it, but I got to hurry. That's good stress. We all know what bad stress is. I won't go into it. This is not quality time in the hive. Next spring, which I'd like to think is just in sight now, but it's not, here in late January, I tell myself that it is, but it's not in sight. I like quality time in the hive. I like those days when the bees are happy, and I'm happy, and the sky is blue, and bluebirds are building nests, and I'm opening the hive, and the bees are gentle, and nectar is dripping on my shoes.

Those are good days. Each of us should keep in mind that when we open the hive, in general, we are the invader bees probably fear the most. Out of bears and skunks, and Varroa mite, humans are the ones that routinely and so thoroughly override the bees' defensive system. While we're looking for quality time in the hive, we're actually causing great deals of stress. Next spring, as I have done now for past years, many, many past years, I'm going to accept the fact that as my management procedures work, and I'm able to produce bees that grow far beyond the normal bee population cycle, I'm going to have booming hives of bees if I'm lucky.

Then when you manage those bees and open them up, because you're supposed to check Varroa, check brood populations, be sure of this, what's the queen doing? I've got that colony open. Who amongst you can close that colony up and not crush some bees? Many cases, a lot of bees. Those beautiful colonies, when the bees just tumble out all over the top edges of the hive body you're working at, smoke, smoke, smoke, smoke, smoke, smoke, brush, brush, smoke, smoke. It's just like herding cats. For every bees you push back into the colony, five or six more come out.

At some point, all you do is you have to do it. By going into the colony, looking to be sure they're okay to reduce their colony stress, to improve my good colony stress, to have quality time with my bees, all I do is end up crushing these bees, trying to put it back together, all to say, "That looked good." It looked good except the 600 bees or so, 200 bees that I crushed putting it back together. There is the whole process of this management preparation and routine maintenance that we do that the bees so often find to be disruptive, confusing. You need to know what the queen's doing. You need to know what's going on with those bees and if she's looking okay.

I think that one of the aberrations of modern management beekeeping procedures, these big populations will absolutely require that at some time there's just going to be collateral damage when you put that thing back together. You simply can't help it. Drone management, I don't try to manage drones. Do you? 100 years ago, back when everything happened in my bee life, drones were thought to be laggards, to be store consumers, honey consumers. All they did was occasionally mate with queens and even then beekeepers knew, scientists knew that precious, precious few drones are successful at it.

All they're there is for genetic diversity, for randomization. Most drones never do anything but get a free ride in life from the honey stores. During those days, it was really strongly suggested that you keep drone sales to an absolute minimum, just destroy frames that have a lot of drones, replace them, rebuild the combs, do whatever. I leave drones in there. I don't try to cut them off the top bars. I just don't bother them. One of the things that I will continue to do that I've done now for years is fairly happily tolerate drones. In fact, it's almost a general rule that if the drones in the colony look really healthy and well-fed and are vigorous and active, can that be taken to be an indicator that the colony is thriving?

Because when you go to a layer worker colony and there's those drones that are half size, lethargic, don't particularly care if you're there or not, that's an indicator that that colony is not thriving. That would be an indication of that too. One prevention, not even going to try to cut down swarm cells. I haven't done that now for years. If I see a cell in swarming season is going full bore, I'll probably knock it down. To systematically open a colony, put it through all this grief that I've just talked about, just to tear down swarm cells, I'm not going to do it.

These are all just a few randomized points that I've got here on a cold, cold day, as I look forward to the time that I can spend time with my bees, something I don't think they care a thing about. There it is. It's really, really hard to save a small colony in the winter. It's really, really hard to go into a colony and tinker around with it without causing more stress than you ever intended. I look forward to talking with you next week. I'm really eager to get this new year going. Thank you so much for listening. This is Jim telling you bye.

[00:21:03] [END OF AUDIO]