Recovering from a Nectarless Spring & Adding honey supers

HONEY SUPER BOXES:

I will be adding honey supers this week. These are the medium boxes on the top of the upper brood box.

I predict two medium honey super boxes will be sufficient this season.

In the first seven or so years, I used a queen excluder to keep queens from laying eggs in the honey frames. 

I no longer use a queen excluder for this purpose because it creates a challenge for the bees to squeeze through the steel grates to store nectar. This slows them down, decreasing honey production. For new honey frames with no honeycomb, the bees tend to seal off the queen excluder with wax, creating a ceiling which impedes honeycomb from being built and utilized for nectar storage. 

Most always my experience has been that if a queen lays eggs in a honey super box, she only does this in two or three frames, not the entire box. She seems to know this is where the honey will be stored. After the initial two or frames of pupa hatch out, the wax cells are recycled to be used for honey stores.

What I use queen excluders for is storing equipment to keep rodents from eating the honeycomb and building nests in the boxes during winter months. They allow fresh air to flow through the hive bodies which prevents mold and mildew. 

NECTARLESS SPRING:

The spring 2023 beekeeping season started out with one huge challenge . . . unseasonably cold temperatures which contributed to:

• A nectarless spring, which I have only seen two other seasons in my 20 years of keeping bees in Interior Alaska;

• Lack of food stores;
• Low brood population build-up.

During nectarless seasons, flowering plants/trees only produce enough nectar for their own food sugars. They simply don't have enough sun to photosynthesize enough to produce extra nectar for pollinators. Pollinators then fly several miles per day with little success of finding enough nectar to bring back to their colony. 

Fortunately, Fairbanks has experiences several warm days in the past week and it appears as though we may continue to see ~70*+ days with minimal rain. This should help our honeybees to find an abundance of nectar. Keep in mind, however, the very best seasons are ones with daily sunshine and a good rain shower every day or two through out the summer.

What we can do for the rest of this season is make sure our colonies have plenty of water nearby. If you don't have a natural source of water in the near vicinity, I recommend you create a water source. 

Here are some great container options for providing water:

• bird bath
• kiddy pool 
• large bowl or shallow tote
• 5 gallon bucket

I always float twigs, or wood in the water to help bees refrain from drowning. You can add rocks or moss to the water as well.

Here's a fun NASA website to explore:

https://honeybeenet.gsfc.nasa.gov/Honeybees/Basics.htm

I'm being very careful to stay on top of hive checks every 10 days!

Let's pray the ladder half of summer provides a perfect balance of sunshine and rain for surplus nectar supplies. Our colonies desperately need to make up for lost time!

June - The Swarming Month

Colonies tend to desire swarming more in June than any other month. Completing hive checks every 10 days is essential! You'll know that a colony is serious about swarming when you see queen cups filled with a bed of royal jelly. If you see empty queen cups in the early stage (not completely drawn out) these are on standby in the case a colony loses a queen. When this happens, the workers create royal jelly and fill a ready made queen cup with the jelly. They steal an egg from one of the worker cells and drag this fertilized egg over to the queen cup, planting it in the middle of the royal jelly bed. The queen then emerges from her cell anywhere from 11-14 days later. 

        
Queen Cups

Queen cups with bed of royal jelly and queen larva.

Please complete hive checks every ten days!

It is not yet time to add honey supers, especially with all the ridiculously, unseasonably cold weather we've been experiencing! If colonies don't have pollen stores, you could give then a quarter pollen patty just to help them get caught back up on this. Without pollen, babies starve because they need beebread which is a mixture of pollen and nectar or honey or when these aren't available, pollen and sugar water will suffice.

Remember to follow the beekeepers calendar as a tentative guide for hive adjustments.

Unfortunately, it is getting more difficult to find replacement queens now. You can try to ship them in from this company: https://www.koehnen.com/contact

If you lose a queen there are three choices:

#1 - Order a new queen and when she arrives, hang her for a minimum of five days in the middle of the top brood box to prevent the bees from killing her. They need time to get used to a new queen's pheromones. I tape the cap onto the queen cage to make sure she does not escape the cage prematurely. On the fifth day after hanging the new queen, I take the cap off, and scoop about half of the sugar candy out of the cage tunnel. 

#2 - Allow your colony to create a new queen. There must be eggs present for this to happen. If you remove all the queen cups and cells with royal jelly/queen larva before you determine you have lost a queen, then there's no chance for the colony to create a new queen. This is why we must make sure we have a queen or see evidence of a queen having laid eggs in the past couple days before removing all queen cells during hive checks. To allow a colony to create a new queen, we must make our best choice of available queen cells, removing all other queen cells and/or cups. This prevents more than one queen hatching out within the same time period, causing them to battle to the death. This can cause  queens injuries and possible death. 

#3 - Combine your queenless colony with a colony that has a queen. This is done by placing several sheets of paper over the top hive body box of the queenless hive. (I like to use the Fairbanks Daily News paper without ink printed on it). Make about 5 two-inch slices in the paper with your hive tool to give the bees an area to start tearing away and eating the paper. This method works great in most cases and this slow combining of the two colonies helps them to become acquainted gradually so there is less fighting.

I plan to wait until I see the brood nest in each of my colonies extend below the top box and down into the middle frames of the top brood box to swap the positions of the boxes. When I see the brood next spanning both brood boxes, I will put the bottom box on the top and the top on the bottom.

Whenever I see rainy days and temperatures lower than 40*, for more than a few days, I give each colony a small square of pollen so the queen doesn't stop laying. Remember, our main goal this time of year is to get the worker population as high as possible to prepare for the huge honeyflow when all the flora is at it's peak of the summer. This usually occurs between the last week of June and the first couple weeks of August. I suspect for Interior Alaska this season, everything will be a couple weeks later than usual.

I hope you're enjoying this beautiful adventure!

:) Dawn