At the end of my last post I showed you following picture:
This has been a common theme in all my hives when I opened them this January. The bees have overwintered well this year and colonies look strong and healthy.
There are many more risk factors which might affect your bees in a negative way. However, for now I will limit my posts to the three main reasons why beekeepers keep losing bees every winter. I have posted reason #1 and reason #2 over the past few weeks and today I am going to conclude this series with the Honey Bee’s Enemy #3 – Starvation!
Bees eat honey! Yes, this is for real, they are not producing honey as a treat for us humans, they need honey to survive! Fortunately for us, during a good summer a colony can produce much more honey than what they will consume during the winter. We call this surplus honey, this is the extra honey beekeepers get to harvest. The amount of honey bees need to overwinter varies by region, however, here in the Pacific Northwest I try to leave them about 80 pounds of honey. This is a full deep brood box of honey. I overwinter most hives in two deep brood boxes.
I do check the weight of the hives throughout the winter and I also add dry sugar as previously discussed in the moisture post. In case you missed it, here is another picture of the emergency sugar sitting on the inner cover.
All my colonies are doing well and I have not lost any yet. That being said, winter isn’t over and we have two more months to go before the first flow of nectar will come into the hives. Be aware, if colonies are strong in January, they will also consume more honey, the queen will start laying more eggs, larvae need to be fed, etc. If you don’t keep an eye on your hives during the next couple of months your bees might starve to death. Look at sugar as a cheap insurance policy. Your bees might have enough honey to get by until the next nectar flow, but that extra sugar can be their life insurance in case they do run out of honey.