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!