Archive | September 2019

Late Season Nectar and Pollen

Sep9

The end of summer August to October is a challenging time for honey bees. This season is characterized by oppressive heat, drought, and a shortage of pollen and nectar. The bees naturally start making less brood and pushing drones out of the hive reducing the bee populations in size to only the bees that are essential to overwinter the colony.

If we inspect our hives and determine that our bees do not have enough honey to feed themselves through the winter, we will provide them with sugar syrup in a one-to-one ratio of sugar to water. For the hive that we recently rescued, sugar syrup supplementation was essential because we had put the swarm into a hive with bare frames and they had to quickly build out a store of honey to get through the winter.

While sugar syrup has its benefits, it does not supply the pollen necessary for reproduction. So when late-season blooms come along, we are thrilled that our bees can enrich their diet with nectar. One of the best late-season blooms that’s happening right now is a variety of eucalyptus tree that typically blooms during August and September. Here’s a video we took this morning on a hike showing bees delighting in the blossoms from this eucalyptus tree.

Bees Foraging on Late Season Eucalyptus Nectar

Late season Sugar Syrup Supplementation

Sep3

Fall is the time when honey bees run up against nectar dearth. This is when the ready supply of nectar and pollen from blooming flowers trees and shrubs diminish and the bees are forced to rely on their stored honey.

This year, as we wrote about in a previous post, We rescued a late-season swarm and installed them in an empty hive. We knew that starting this colony on bare frames so late in the season presented a risk that they would not survive the winter because they did not have the stored honey to live off of. For this reason, and to help them boost their storage of honey, we began to feed them one to one sugar to water syrup and discovered that they were going through a full mason jar twice a day. When we inspected the hive just 10 days after rescuing it, we were amazed by how much come and honey the bees had already built up in the hive. Sugar water was proving to be a great support.

We read that sugar supplementation increases the chance of robbing by other colonies, so we decided to supplement our next weakest hive at the same time. So far, so good. All hives are thriving.