For two winters now we’ve gone into the cold with healthy flourishing hives, and came into spring with dead bees. There are a number of things that will kill bees over the course of a long Northeast winter, and to prepare for them I’ve had to learn what they are. This has been a process of classroom learning and sheer experience. My hope is that this combined learning will result in healthy hives when dandelions start sprouting next at the end of next month.

I have to admit that my first season I was wildly naive. I can’t tell you how often it was reiterated that pest management needed to happen, and it needed to happen several times throughout the season. But being the flower child and resident know it all I am, I decided that my bees were going to be all natural and chemical free. I had even believed that by doing so I could find and propagate a line of genetics that would be resistant to varroa destructor, the pest most likely to cause the collapse of a hive. As many of you know, I was wrong and as a result I opened my hives in early spring that year to find mold growing on comb that still had honey in it. Integrated pest management is a must for the hives, and this year we used a number of “soft chemicals” like oxalic acid and Formic acid, which are acceptable to use and maintain “organic” status if we wanted, are not too hard on the bees, but effectively reduced the mite load of a hive during the year.

The hives in the thick of winter ‘19/’20

Now the obvious danger in winter is weather conditions, but to survive the season conditions have to be near perfect inside the hive as well. As the bees cluster around the queen and produce heat, they’re also producing a great deal of condensation. If the hive hasn’t been prepared for this then the condensation will pool on the ceiling and drip down onto the cluster, and while the bees can deal with the cold...they can’t deal with wet and cold. This can be dealt with several ways, all of which we used in tandem this winter. The most natural way to deal with condensation is to make sure that there is air circulation in the hive. To do this I generally flip the internal cover to create an air exit that goes right to the inside of the hive. Secondly, we acquired some homasote board to place on top of the internal cover to absorb and wick away any moisture that stays. Finally, and this was a strategy we learned from Uncle Arnie this year, the hives were tilted forward to prevent any moisture that might pool from falling on the cluster instead creating conditions for it to run to and down the front wall of the hives.

Bees emerge from the hive at the first signs of spring this April, 2020.

Now most importantly, and this may be where I went a little wrong this winter, it is vital to make sure that the hive has enough honey to get themselves through the winter without starving. This can mean as much as 85lbs in a single hive, and by mid September the queen is basing hive population on the amount of resources the hive has. So by shortly after Labor Day, there should be no more extraction. The one hive that I know is dead was my super productive Hive 1, and I’m afraid I’m my excitement I dipped in a little too hard and a little too long this year.

I’m excited to report that the last week of February gave some opportunity to get in and reinforce the 3 hives and 1 split that we have left. I am so cautiously optimistic that we will get more hives through the season than we may be able to handle, given that each hive will almost certainly need to be split to prevent swarming. I hope that our hard work and experience will result in healthy hives that are able to continue sustaining...but will also start producing honey without the required buildup of a first year hive.

~ Chris, The Boxing Beekeeper