Prepping for Winter with Will (206)

Episode 206 – Prepping for Winter with Will

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Jim Tew: Hey, listeners. As usual, I tend to start out with a weather update and a weather explanation. It's a rainy, dark, gloomy, coolish day. I'm here with Will. Say hi, Will.

Will Laditka: Good to be back.

Jim: We were going to go out and do a podcast for you in the yard. We went out yesterday afternoon, got all set up, and we were just lecturing away. You would have been so impressed, right, Will?

Will: Oh, it was the best.

Jim: Yes, and the batteries were dead on the recorder. By then we had lost the light. Daylight savings is gone and so it gets dark too early so we put it off till today, and now it's flooding. We want to talk to you about Will's first winter and about wintering in general and preparing for it. That's our plan for today. I'm Jim Tew and I come to you about once a week here on Honey Bee Obscura where I talk about something to do with Plain Talk Beekeeping. Will, tell us who you are.

Will: I'm Will Laditka. I'm his grandson. It's my third appearance here now. It's good to be back. I've missed it, so it's going to be a fun one today.

Jim: Glad to have you here because it's good to have somebody sitting here with me.

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 honeybees. Jim hosts fun and interesting guests who take a deep dive into the intricate world of honeybees. Whether you're a seasoned beekeeper or just getting started, get ready for some plain talk that'll delve into all things honeybees.

Jim: The weather is changing. I just mentioned daylight savings time going away. It's a gloomy, quiet, rainy day and the bees know it. The bees are perfectly aware. I don't know that I have the authority to speak for them, but they know the season of the year. What my plan was that blew up yesterday was for Will and me to look at that little colony that I've talked about, talked about, talked about.

Yes, you were involved in that little hive there for a while. It was a small swarm that moved in last spring in a very idiotic way. It moved into some equipment that was already being eaten up by wax moths so they took on a huge battle. I've said this before. If we don't help it quickly, it's going to go away. We had a look yesterday. Will, did you notice anything good, bad? What was your impression being really a first-year beekeeper without a winter under his belt yet? What'd you notice?

Will: They have clustered really well in that sphere shape in the center, which is always interesting to see. It takes me back to when I first had my hive and they were still young, but as they expanded, they filled out more. That circular shape, especially now when it starts to get colder, has always been interesting to me. Is there any sort of explanation to that or is it just a bee thing?

Jim: It is a bee thing. That's a good way of wording it. It's a very, very elegantly complicated bee thing. Those bees are forming that cluster, that group. By grouping together, they conserve heat. They generate heat. They conserve heat. I used to try to give this analogy, Will. If we were in this shop that we're in now and suddenly I lowered the temperature to about 20 degrees below zero and you and the rest of our family were in here, and we didn't have on jackets and winter gear, probably inside of 35, 45 minutes, we would be one close-knit family. We would be hugging each other, standing close by, doing anything to generate family communal warmth. Does that make sense?

Will: Yes.

Jim: Am I drawing in your mind okay? That's what bees are doing, is that they have reduced their entire 18,800-acre foraging area to an environment really not much larger than a volleyball in a good-sized colony. All the components are there. The older bees tend to be in the outer shell of this cluster. The younger bees tend to be inside. Will, we didn't pull frames out. That would have been really detrimental to that colony yesterday, but I'm comfortable telling you there's almost no brood in there. If there's no brood there, they can drop that temperature inside that nest to around 70 to 72 degrees Fahrenheit. That's very economical from a hunting consumption standpoint. If they were raising brood and they will be next spring, if hopefully they're still alive, then they are going to just blow through amazing amounts of honey.

Will: You mentioned the older bees being on the outside of that volleyball-type cluster. Is there any rhyme or reason to that or is that just a general--

Jim: Well, it's just like the bees that are outside, the older bees. Those winter bees do tend to live longer. They could live as long as three months. There's some hormonal reasons for that and there's just some statistical reasons for that. If you're a winter bee in the hive, you don't get hit by a car and you don't get eaten by a spider. There are statistical reasons why they live longer as well as hormonal reasons. Those bees on the outside of the insulating shell just tend to be the older bees because their glands have already grown and have aged.

Will: You also talked about not much brood being in the hive, and that's due to what reasons? Is there any reasoning there?

Jim: Yes.

Will: Is it because that hive was small?

Jim: I should probably have checked this more closely, but there is a steady state equilibrium. Those bees are going to cut the population. When you and I opened a hive last spring and we just about got our butts handed to us in a bag because we weren't equipped well enough, that was a huge beehive. If we open that hive now, I bet you it won't have half the number of bees in it that it had then because the bees will drop that total adult population because it's more efficient at winter on a lower quantity of honey than it is to go into winter with a giant population. Then you've got all those bees to care for, to feed. Yes, they'd probably be warmer, but the economics of it, something about the economics of it, it's more efficient to cut the population by probably two-thirds or so and then winter over with a small population.

Will, when I was a beekeeper just about in the stage you're in, I remember it well. Outright panic. I had five hives. They had all been beautiful hives, chock-a-block full. Come the fall I could tell I'm losing population. This is not many bees here. They're not mound up where they were. You'd go out two weeks later, have a look at the hive, there's even fewer bees and so I was panicking. I contacted beekeepers to find out why are all the bee populations declining in my hives, and someone could explain to me, "It's just a seasonal decline. They'll build back up next spring. They'll store honey. They'll raise brood and it'll all be great and then they'll decline again next fall. They'll do it over and over again."

Will: With that rapid population decline as the winter's foreboding on the horizon, can a hive be too large? Is there a chance that they don't drop enough population before the winter or that population is still too large compared to their honey stores? Is there situations like that? Can a hive be just too large?

Jim: Well, I like that question and I'm going to have to guess some because we as beekeepers do everything we can to keep that a big hive. We keep it much larger than it'd be in nature, I mean by a factor of maybe three to five times larger. Nature is going to want to swarm a lot, stay smaller, produce less honey, and have a totally different reason for survival. As that colony then is too large, is it because we did it? I don't know.

When you were asking that question, my mind was racing because seven or eight years ago I had booming hives and I've got these bizarre late-season swarms. They were hopeless. They were swarming, 4 or 5-pound swarms in September. These bees are suicidal. I wrote articles about them in the bee magazines and I referred to them as suicide swarms.

I decided to work on the hypothesis that the bees in those colonies were lightening their load. They were reducing their population to get to that winter equilibrium that they wanted where it was efficient on stores to survive. The one thing that just shot my hypothesis down, Will, was that the queen left so they had no way to replace the queen back in the home hive. That late-season swarm essentially meant that both hives were probably going to die in the winter.

When you're asking your question, are they cutting the size down, I think they are. I think in the wild, they would not allow that colony build up that large. I think when the colony is as large as it is because we've managed, manipulated, suppressed mites, replaced queens, bumped up queens, great queens, huge population, 65,000, 70,000. I'm just guessing, Will and listeners, that's not a normal situation for a beehive and it may be muddling up some of their instinctual behaviors enough to cast these late swarms and then to be trying to produce queens late in the season. I'm rambling all over. Will, let's take a break while I catch my breath and hear from our sponsor here.

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Jim: Specifically the immediate issue always has been just for, in my case, the academic interest of it, is trying to save that small colony. It was goofy for starting its existence in my yard the way it did, taking on a colony of wax moths more or less. I tried to help it and they do seem to have the wax moths under control just from what we saw yesterday superficially, but they set back now, they're really set back. They spent a lot of time all season trying to collect how they build up from a swarm the size of a softball. They're probably not going to make it, Will.

Listeners and Will, when I make those profound comments like they're probably not going to make it then right away my mind is racing 100 years ago, it seems, when small high beetles were first being introduced, I took a five-frame nuc out to a commercial pumpkin farm and we tried to find these beetle larvae in the ground and did whatever and tried to get some idea, make pictures, see how widespread these beetles are, and Will, that little colony got forgotten. It was just a five-frame nuc, it's going to take a special truck and send a university employee out to get it. It's not worth it. I don't remember, it got forgotten.

Well, the next spring we got a call from the farm owner said, you got some equipment out here? Oh yes, yes, that's a little hive, we'll go pick it up. Will, that colony was alive. It had survived the winter, sitting in the middle of an open pumpkin field and dire winter conditions, five frames of bees and it had survived, so there's that. When I tell you that colony in the back is going to die, then I have this memory right now of a colony that didn't die at all. When you think you know the answer and the outcome, you don't at all.

I need to go back there. Will has got to go back home, listeners, so it'll be me again. I've got to find time to go back there and transfer those 5 frames to a 10-frame colony, and Will then ask me a question about this honey thing because I'm going to transfer honey from the other colonies socialistically and give that colony more honey than it could have produced on its own. Then I'm going to try to insulate it some to see if I can nurture that thing enough just to get it through the winter.

Will: Yes, so we've talked about a hive being too large, but at this point, can a hive be too small and just not have enough honey stores to get any sort of population through the winter? If that population didn't get enough honey, is there any way that you can bolster it or reinforce it with more honey from another hive?

Jim: Yes. More honey, too late to feed. You could put dry sugar on and things like that. You didn't ask that question. I'm answering a question you didn't ask. You got to transfer honey in the frames. Anything else is just going to be a bandaid that's just going to prolong their torment before they die. Yes, it can be too small. A small cluster can have a ton of honey, and if the temperature extremes get low enough, often enough, they can't combat it so they can't maintain the brood nest temperature just due to small population size and temperature dynamics not being on their side.

You can be too small, no doubt about that, but the question I struggle with a bit ago that you and I talked about is can a colony be too large to go into winter? We've already been through that. Yes, a colony can be too small to survive the winter. The thing too that comes to mind that I've harped on it and harped on it, I don't know what I'm talking about, but I think there's something to it, is that those nice straight frames, Will, we want those frames so we can pull those out, look at bees, look at brood, have an idea of what's going on.

If you look at a natural bee nest, it doesn't look like that at all. The combs are contorted and twisted and weaving back on themselves. This just looks like a first-class mess. That's what the early beekeepers had to deal with to figure out ways to keep these bees inside these frames. That really affects clustering dynamics, Will, because the bees can't really get together. They're separated in these aisles between the combs. When I've talked, other times, I've said the bees are actually surviving in clusterettes. It's not really one cluster per se because it's separated by the individual straight frames. They can't interact, they can't cross back and forth.

When I was a young guy trying to develop new techniques and procedures, I actually took combs and cut three-inch holes right in the middle of them. I did this late in the season, my plan was for the bees to be able to go through those holes and interact with each other between the frames and share food, and share pheromones. I couldn't tell that they wintered any better, Will, but this is what happened. In the next spring when the flow started, those bees filled all my holes with drone comb so I had these weird round drone comb sections right in the middle of my frames. I couldn't even modify my human system of nest layout because the bees, any chance they got, would go back to their system of nest maintenance and put drones in that hole in the middle of their brood nest area. I'm concerned at times that our boxes that we use are not always well-suited from a bee standpoint.

Will: We've talked about these large hives slowing down as the winter approaches and dropping population. With this hive we've got, just those 5 frames, are they going to do a similar process or are they self-aware that they're so small that they're not going to slow down and they're going to keep that current population or do we know?

Jim: You threw me off the track at self-aware. That's really an interesting subject area with that little supraesophageal ganglia. Will, the bee's brain is hardly the size of, not much bigger than a typewritten period, and yet with that small brain, they really make some sophisticated decisions. Are they aware that they're too small? I've often wondered, listeners and Will, when we take honey away from our bees in the late spring, early summer, are our bees traumatized by that? Did they think instinctually plenty of honey, we can go about our business of swarming, we can get on with our life? We've had a good year. Whoa, we just lost 70 pounds of honey. What a setback.

I just can't help but believe that in some instinctual way, the bees were aware of their resource load, and I just can't help but believe that in some instinctual way, they are aware that that resource load is gone. Now, in our defense, a bear could do that, a raccoon could do that, a skunk could do that. It's not like we are a unique predator amongst bees. They have other reasons that catastrophes could befall them. I'm guessing they have some way of knowing.

You asked me yesterday when we first opened that hive, you asked about the queen and does she make the decisions on the brood. I tried to explain to you then, and I'll tell you again that no, it's not seemingly the queen that's making the population decision. It's more a cadre of young workers that are cleaning cells, feeding the queen, keeping the brood nest running, keeping a tidy house as it were, so there's plenty for the queen to do.

As the season changes and the food begins to decline and they got to get more serious about economizing stores, then they'll back it down on the queen, stop feeding her so much, which tapers down on her egg production rate. They'll stop providing cells for her to lay in. Really in our area here in Northeast Ohio, where they coast to a complete stop starting right about now through January, and then probably mid-January, early February, spot a brood the size of the palm of your hand and they'll begin to pick back up again and then they'll rebuild that cycle throughout the season of building that population back up just to have it die back down next fall about this time over and over and over again.

Will: Is this a coordinated effort between worker bees to dial this population down or is it an individual thing? Are they working together? Is there cooperation or not?

Jim: That's the same-- It's a subdivision of that question you asked, are bees aware? It's not a coordinated effort, but it looks like it. Apparently, individual bees make individual decisions that benefit their individual situation. It's really difficult to describe it any other way than that. There's not a cadre of bees overseeing everything, monitoring everything, checking everything, giving instructions to others. For the most part, bees seem to do what's best suited for them. There are stimuli, Will, from pheromones, from brood and feed, and stores and propolis. There's certainly stimuli that may make them have an idea, but for the most part, it's individual bees having individual ideas. It's a team effort that doesn't have really a team leader.

Will: In terms of that small hive we've got back there, what's next from a beekeeping standpoint?

Jim: The thing next for that small hive if I were a competent beekeeper, is to transfer it to 10 frames. Probably give it 5 more frames of honey. I need to check the mite load and see what I can do to knock the mites down even though it's late to be doing that. Will, I'd like to add some insulation to it. The insulation isn't critical according to Anne Fry. I liked her comment in several podcasts ago that she could still do insulating activities next spring, late next winter, early next spring because right now, their brew population is declining and they're not trying to maintain all that much. Right now, if I had to really give something top priority is to give that colony more stores and give it some insulations to see if we can help it get through the winter.

I got to cut you off, buddy. I could talk to you the rest of the day, but we're winding down. Going to keep it about 20 minutes or so here and we are over time. Will, I enjoy talking to you. I hope you'll do it again sometime.

Will: I appreciate you having me on again. It was good to be back. Thanks to listeners for the support. Good to be here. Hopefully, I'll return soon, so you might hear from me again.

Jim: Well, I hope so. I can't add anything to that. Nice job, Will.

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