6 Essential Actions to Help Your Bees Survive the Winter Months
Mite Control
Mite control in the fall is crucial to ensure the survival and health of your bees during the winter months. Bees with winter physiology will last between four and six months (sometimes longer), but if they are infested with mites their lifespan will be reduced dramatically and they may die off before winter is over. Mites can weaken bees and transmit diseases, so it’s crucial for your bees to be in peak health and strength during winter to increase their chances of survival.
Fall is your last chance to get these pests under control. We suggest testing your mite levels and if needed treat with your product of choice. Once treated it is a good idea to wait a few weeks and then test again to make sure the treatment was successful. If the second test is still high, you will want to treat again. Repeat this process until your mites are under control.
Evaluate Your Queen
During fall you need to evaluate your queen and decide if replacing her is necessary. As with any inspection you are looking for eggs, larvae and capped brood. If your queen’s brood pattern is poor, or there are little or no eggs and larvae, then you might want to replace your queen.
Ideally you want to have four to six frames of capped brood heading into winter. These bees will be of winter physiology and will have the physical makeup to survive the four to six months needed until spring arrives. If your queen is not up to the task, then it reduces the chance of the colony surviving winter. With drones becoming scarce and Queen breeding houses running out of queens for the year, this will be your final chance to get a queen in place if needed.
Feed Your Bees
Fall is when the flowers start dying off which reduces the amount of resources your bees can collect and use for the colony. When winter hits you want your hive to have plenty of food for your bees to survive the winter. Now is the time to feed your bees so they don’t use up the food they will need later, or build up their stores if they are low.
If you feed your bees 1:1 sugar syrup (along with any additives you like to use), this syrup will be used right away for your colony. If you add protein powder or other additives, it will help keep the Queen producing brood and you are more likely get a larger colony headed into winter.
If you feed your bees 2:1 sugar syrup it will promote the bees to store it for future use rather then using it right away. This is a good strategy if your hive has low stores and you want to build up resources for later use.
Reduce Hive Entrance
Reducing the entrance to your hive will help with the amount of cold air that is blown into the hive, provide a smaller space for your bees to defend in a robbing situation and helps keep mice and other critters from getting into your hive. If you have an upper entrance in your hive, you could also close or block the lower entrance all together and let your bees use the upper entrance exclusively. If you do not have an upper entrance, you will need to leave a portion of the lower entrance open for your bees to use.
This also a good time to put on mice guards, robber screens, or other items you like to use that help prevent other animals and insects from getting into your hive and using it for shelter in the winter.
Combine Hives
If you have a failing queen, not enough stores, a weak hive, or not enough brood you might consider combining this hive with another hive in your apiary so that it doesn’t fail over winter. Combining a weak hive with another hive gives both hives a much higher chance of surviving winter because they will be stronger together then separate. This may require you to kill one of your queens, but it will be better than letting both hives struggle through the winter and neither one surviving. In this case evaluate which queen is best and use it for the combined hive.
If you eliminate equipment during the process of combining hives, you will need to pick the best boxes and the frames that have the most resources, eggs, larvae and brood on them to use in the combined hive.
Consolidate Frames in Your Hive
If you have frames that are not completely drawn out, don’t have good resources or don’t have good brood you should consider removing them from you hive for winter unless you are positive they will get drawn out and filled before the temperature drops below 50 degrees Fahrenheit. If you remove any frames from you hive you will need to replace these frames with ones that have good resources or brood. You might also consider dropping down from a double deep setup to a single deep setup if the combined 40 frames are not packed full of resources and then pick out the best 20 frames to use in the single deep setup. Furthermore, if you have a super on and it is not full of nectar, capped honey, or brood then you might want to remove it from the hive and extract any honey you can and then store it for the winter.
This may sound overwhelming or too complicated to pull off, but it isn’t as difficult as it sounds. The idea is that you want to have plenty of stores and resources for your bees to use during winter, and by consolidating frames that don’t have these resources you give your bees the best chance for surviving winter. You may also want to eliminate equipment (go from double deep to single deep or remove super) at this time to make sure your bees have the best frames possible.