Until a month ago, I never would have thought to look at the honey frames in the brood boxes to make sure that they are full. I always just leave them in, fully capped with honey, with no intention of removing brood box frames of resources from the bees so they can sustain our measly winters. It wasn't until a few weeks ago when there was a swarm reported across the street from my hive that I started considering what all the frames in the brood box look like.
Before heading to the hive on my lunch break to inspect for swarm signs, I bragged to my coworkers, "I'm going to go steal the honey from my bees" thinking "they just don't appreciate what they have and continue again and again to swarm. This will give them something to work for." I get to the hive and start looking at what was once close to a completely full honey super and see several frames almost entirely empty. Frustrated, I thought "these bees stuffed themselves before they swarmed on me. Again. Jerks." Then I decided to look at the end frames in the brood boxes to see what was left there before taking the time to feather all the bees off of the honey frames. I was astonished. There was no honey left and barely any pollen. It turned out that these bees had their priorities straight and hadn't swarmed on me but were struggling to make due in this crazy drought year in California. The swarm across the street must have been a mere coincidence. With no real pollen or honey stores, these honey bees were barely getting by and would surely never survive a winter if the hopeful El Nino were to appear.
Luckily, I had held onto 4 deep frames of honey without extracting them. Since that inspection, I have been giving these frames of honey back to the bees so that they have a shot of surviving with the food they worked so hard for in early spring. I've also dumped a bunch of my older jars of honey into pans with wine corks and chop sticks as little flotation rafts for the bees. They clean up 24 ounces of honey within a week without problem.
Something to consider when feeding a hive so much delicious, highly nutritious, fragrant honey is protecting the hive even further. It's literally a bee-eat-bee world out there in these tough times and the gentlest insects have the most predators. If it's not aggressive yellow jackets picking my sweet darling bees out of the air and biting their fuzzy little heads off, it's worrying about an entire other hive in more dire conditions than my girls risking it all to steal my girls' honey. So, to protect the hive I've reduced the entrance to the smallest size possible and put a preventative robbing screen on. Maybe this is a little overkill with mommying them, but there's been a lot of robbing going on in Marin County recently.
My other two hives were in a similar situation and have been slowly fed our older honey from the jar with little bee rafts, practically creating a bee resort inside the hive. I set the feeding pool, with many bee rafts on the inner cover and put an extra box around it, so they can feast from within their own home just like our Turkey day.
All in all, they will need a lot of feeding to survive the winter. Once I go through all the honey that I have, I will likely have to resort to mixing them a thick simple syrup and if the temperatures ever drop, make them a little honey bee fondant, full of delicious sugars, fats, and essential oils.
Before heading to the hive on my lunch break to inspect for swarm signs, I bragged to my coworkers, "I'm going to go steal the honey from my bees" thinking "they just don't appreciate what they have and continue again and again to swarm. This will give them something to work for." I get to the hive and start looking at what was once close to a completely full honey super and see several frames almost entirely empty. Frustrated, I thought "these bees stuffed themselves before they swarmed on me. Again. Jerks." Then I decided to look at the end frames in the brood boxes to see what was left there before taking the time to feather all the bees off of the honey frames. I was astonished. There was no honey left and barely any pollen. It turned out that these bees had their priorities straight and hadn't swarmed on me but were struggling to make due in this crazy drought year in California. The swarm across the street must have been a mere coincidence. With no real pollen or honey stores, these honey bees were barely getting by and would surely never survive a winter if the hopeful El Nino were to appear.
Luckily, I had held onto 4 deep frames of honey without extracting them. Since that inspection, I have been giving these frames of honey back to the bees so that they have a shot of surviving with the food they worked so hard for in early spring. I've also dumped a bunch of my older jars of honey into pans with wine corks and chop sticks as little flotation rafts for the bees. They clean up 24 ounces of honey within a week without problem.
Something to consider when feeding a hive so much delicious, highly nutritious, fragrant honey is protecting the hive even further. It's literally a bee-eat-bee world out there in these tough times and the gentlest insects have the most predators. If it's not aggressive yellow jackets picking my sweet darling bees out of the air and biting their fuzzy little heads off, it's worrying about an entire other hive in more dire conditions than my girls risking it all to steal my girls' honey. So, to protect the hive I've reduced the entrance to the smallest size possible and put a preventative robbing screen on. Maybe this is a little overkill with mommying them, but there's been a lot of robbing going on in Marin County recently.
My other two hives were in a similar situation and have been slowly fed our older honey from the jar with little bee rafts, practically creating a bee resort inside the hive. I set the feeding pool, with many bee rafts on the inner cover and put an extra box around it, so they can feast from within their own home just like our Turkey day.
All in all, they will need a lot of feeding to survive the winter. Once I go through all the honey that I have, I will likely have to resort to mixing them a thick simple syrup and if the temperatures ever drop, make them a little honey bee fondant, full of delicious sugars, fats, and essential oils.