Survivor

This worker bee was one of thousands gladly taking the syrup I offered on a warm day last week. If you look closely at her thorax (the middle section of her body), you can see how worn her hairs are. Her tattered hair reveals that she's a winter bee who made it through the coldest months and is now working to usher in a new generation. And it hasn't been an easy winter. She didn't have the luxury of hibernating or hiding away in a pupal state. No, with every degree it dropped, she shivered more to generate the warmth needed to keep her sisters--and her mother--alive. And now, with temperatures barely warm enough to sustain flight, she forages for nectar and pollen to feed the brood that's quickly taking over the comb in her hive. She will die soon, and the progeny she's worked so hard for will carry on. And they'll only live for about 4-6 weeks. This girl, however, has been alive for 6 months. In human terms, this is like some people living to 320 while the rest of us die at 75. Despite these seemingly impossible odds, she has survived just long enough to ensure her family sees another winter. As long as I don't screw it up for them.

Bee Smart Feeder

It's been warm enough during the days for foragers to forage, but still too cold at night to confidently put syrup inside hives. The compromise is open feeding, and I'm doing the job with these Bee Smart "Ultimate Hive Feeders." I like the Bee Smart feeders better than a typical bucket feeder for this purpose because they can deliver far more food in a short time. Rather than having to take turns drinking from a dozen holes poked in the lid of an inverted bucket feeder, hundreds of bees line up around the rim and fill up as fast as new bees can arrive. Also, setting it out in the sun helps keep the syrup from chilling the bees, and there's no danger of wild temperature swings inducing uncontrolled leaks over the cluster.

Open feeding has its critics, who often claim it creates "lazy" bees (which is nuts) or that it induces robbing. On the contrary, by feeding this way I'm giving workers in my strong and weak colonies food to gather outside the bee yard. Without this productive distraction, I suspect stronger colonies would be much more fierce in their robbing efforts, and weaker colonies would be hard-pressed to build up fast enough to fend off the attackers.

2019 UPDATE: I’ve mostly stopped using the Bee Smart feeders at this point, because I’ve found that drilling some small holes near the lid of a plastic jug, filling it with syrup, and inverting it just works better. It’s easier to refill, costs nothing, and there’s no chance bees can crawl inside and die (as long as you keep the holes small enough). So save yourself some money and make your own feeders. I make mine from shake jugs—I used to toss these into the garbage. You too are probably throwing away plastic containers that you could quickly convert into effective feeders, so give it a try before you drop a nickle on fancy feeders.

Skunk at the Bee Hive

A few of my hives have the telltale sign they've been visited recently by a hungry skunk, or possibly an opossum. Skunks (and opossums) tend to chew up honey bees and then spit out the exoskeletons in wads that resemble chewing tobacco. It's been cold enough at night that live bees probably aren't being coaxed out of the hives and eaten. Instead, the critter is likely just cleaning up the already-dead bees on the ground in front of the hives. So no harm no foul. If it were warmer and the bees were being taken alive, a common solution is to run a strip of carpet tack in front of the entrance. This helps keep skunks from scratching the hive with their hands to draw out bees from the safety of the box. That could be a compounding problem over the course of several days or weeks, but as long as we've got winter weather, cold temps and a lack of food remain my biggest concerns.

Diagnosing a Winter Dead Out

I just spent several hours diagnosing the cause of a winter dead out. I went through the enter hive, each frame, top-to-bottom, paying close attention to the contents of cells and the state of the bees themselves. I also reviewed my records for the hive, because the logical first question is, "Did mites kill them?" It's possible the mites did weaken them enough to contribute to their demise. The colony consistently had my heaviest mite load throughout 2017. I got it below 1% by the end of October, but a lot of viral damage could've been done by then. So I'm going to say mites were a factor, but not the sole cause of death. As I explained in my last post, I experimented with this hive by foregoing fall feeding in an attempt to avoid a honey-bound hive in the spring. Here's the unfortunate result as I see it:

1. During the fall and early winter, the colony completely exhausted all food resources in the bottom box. It was totally empty.
2. Following the food, the bees clustered in the back-left corner of the top box.
3. The temperatures stayed well below freezing from December 23 through January 7. I found a lot of dead bees on the bottom board during this time, suggesting they weren't getting the calories to keep fueled. It was too cold to shift the cluster over new honey during this time.
4. When the cold spell ended and it got warm enough to fly, the colony was sufficiently weakened to be vulnerable to robbing. I tried to stave off robbers by closing and reducing entrances, but they were overpowered nonetheless.
5. The arctic weather returned from January 12 through 17, and by this time the colony was so decimated by winter and robbing that they succumbed to the second round of extreme cold.

The postmortem showed bees with their heads buried in cells (shown in the picture), with empty cells directly under the nest. This is the classic sign of starvation. Sadly, there was still 30-40 pounds of capped honey in the hive--mostly near the center of the top box; frustratingly close to the cluster itself. This would be even more tragic if I didn't learn from it, and what I learned is that fall feeding is not optional. You've got to try to backfill every last cell in the hive to give the bees the best chance of surviving long periods of freezing temperatures. Any downside to overfeeding in the fall is better than a box of dead bees in the spring.