Although spring seems like a time of new beginnings in so many ways, with our bees it also feels like an ending. It’s an ending to the winter when we have to make sure we’ve set our bees up for success through snow, wind, rain, and sometimes temperatures more than 20 degrees below zero.
We’re getting to the close of our most successful overwintering of bees so far. Our biggest challenge has been keeping our bees fully fed and dry throughout the winter. Some years we get snow in the late fall and it stays throughout the winter, keeping our bees relatively insulated. Other years, however, we can get little snow and dangerous cold snaps without that snow to insulate the hives. Other years we get a lot of snow, then melting, damp air, and days that hover just around freezing. Those are the most difficult years for our bees. Unlike our chickens where we can check on them daily and see to their winter needs, it’s dangerous for the bees to open up the hive in winter and let the cold and/or damp air in.
This hive is young enough that they didn’t produce enough of their own honey to keep them fed and warm all winter. We originally built them a candy board (see more posts about Bees) and they ate up the first one very quickly and we suspected other bees were coming in and robbing it. So we built a second one and included protein patties with it so they would have both sugar and protein for the winter. We wrapped up the hive tightly so they were waterproof but still had ventilation, and just had to hope for the best. We had a few bluebird days in the mid-50s and we saw them dragging out the bees that had died over the winter. It seemed like an okay time to peek at the candy board. We were in for a real shock when it was completely gone and there isn’t much pollen to speak of yet. We quickly made a new candy block and a protein patty and waited for another nice day. The bees had gotten very sluggish and slow by that point, but as soon as we gave them the new candy ‘bar’ and protein, they perked right up. We even saw some bringing back pollen from who-knows-where.
It’s always a bit jarring to see the winter dead that they carry out of the hive, but from our very brief peek into the hive, it looks strong still.
We’ve made many winter mistakes, like insulating them too much without enough air flow. That caused moisture to build up on the inside from them clustering to keep the queen warm. That moisture froze and killed them. We’ve thought they had enough honey to last the winter when in fact they didn’t and they starved. One year we cracked it open on a rare nice day in February and they started coming out thinking it was going to be warmer, only for it to get bitter cold the next day and too many died to revive the hive. We always feel terrible when we get it wrong and all of our thousands of little hard-working bee pets die, but we luckily haven’t made any of our mistakes twice.
I hope I’m not jinxing it, but it seems we have made it through the winter with our hive intact and hopefully strong. So as much as spring is a beginning for many things like the garden, chickens laying eggs, trees budding, it’s also an ending to the tough time of year for our bees, and boy am I glad to see those workers zooming around when the sun is shining.