End of the 2021 beekeeping season - overwintering your honeybees!

This is a very strange year and definitely one of the very best honey years I've seen in 17 years of keeping honeybees! What's up with all this August rain, though?

Hopefully, you checked this blog and removed all the capped honey before this monsoon started!

Wrapping up the season can be facilitated two very different ways:

1) Wintering over your bees: Please check out the website of my friends, James and Lisa Harlow. Last year they wintered over five out of five colonies successfully. 

https://rosehipsandhoney.com/bringing-overwintered-honeybees-out-in-the-spring/

You will find that mite treatment, elevation, humidity, proper ventilation, and nutrients, as well as an insulated structure, are key to wintering success. Lisa has some great photos on her blog.

2) Colonies that aren't Russian or Carniolan have a lower wintering survival rate because they do not create as tight of a cluster. Colonies that have not been treated for mites or had all the honey removed and replaced with sugar water and a sugar cake will have less wintering success as well. These colonies should be shop vacuumed into water and recycled by being added to compost or garden soil. The soft organs become part of the soil while the exoskeletons become the most lightweight, organic vermiculite available.

I plan to winter some of my colonies and will report on progress from time to time throughout the winter months.

I clean up any equipment not in use and store it outdoors so it doesn't mold, placing a bottom board on bricks so none of the hive pieces sit in standing water. Then I set a queen excluder on top of the bottom board, stacking multiple boxes filled with drawn-out honeycomb on top of the queen excluder. A telescoping lid is placed on top of the top box. Under a house or shed eave is a great place to store stacks of hive bodies this way because it makes for easy access in the spring before the snow melts completely.

Seriously, read Lisa's blog! You'll learn lots of tricks for wintering over honeybees!

Happy harvesting!!!