 |
| Meager signs of spring: glory-of-the-snow |
I went into this past winter with 5 hives. Two were established hives that survived last winter (one 2 and the other 3 years old), one was a very small 'split' made from an extra queen cell I had kicking around from one of those 2 hives. The other 2 colonies contained the new queens I had grafted in our new Long Island queen rearing program last spring (see post #28). I didn't think the little split would make it through the winter and I was right. Unfortunately, one of my grafted queen colonies has also died, and very recently. Particularly sad since this was the first queen I ever grafted, and they were alive up until a couple of weeks ago.
This winter has been brutal. We had an unusual amount of snow, and some really cold temperatures. But from a bee's perspective those are not the biggest problems. It is a winter warming trend followed by a cold snap that is often death to bees: the warm weather stimulates the queen to lay, then the cold comes and the nurse bees die trying to keep the brood warm. My grafted queen colony did exactly that. As soon as we got a warm day or two, they were active and flying more than the other hives. I worried that they were being imprudent, and my concerns were apparently well-founded.
It was looking like it would be a late spring this year - about a week ago the temperature dropped from upper 50's down to the low 20's. There is little food around for the bees. There are a few crocus around the neighborhood, and snow drops, but even my super-early glory-of-the-snow has only just begun to emerge. So I decided to try something I haven't done before now, and that is to feed my bees pollen patties to supplement this early dearth of natural pollen. A pollen patty is a thin slab of thick brown paste that comes sandwiched between wax paper. You peel off the paper and press the patty down onto the frames and let the bees have at it. I had already begun feeding the bees sugar syrup, but they are not taking a lot of it yet.
Today was warm enough - just barely - for me to crack open the hives and slide in the pollen patties. I watched the bees that were flying to see if they were bringing pollen in themselves yet. I did see some, but it was meager. Nevertheless, bees bringing in pollen means that there is a laying queen in the hive, so I'm cautiously optimistic that my three remaining hives have now made it into a new year.
My friend Richard, whose 2 hives I had moved to my property in autumn 2012, neither of which survived that winter, got 2 replacement packages that I installed last May when I moved the hives back to his nearby summer house. I didn't like one of the packages, and I had suspected that the queen died shortly after the installation. Because his bees hadn't survive the move to my place the year before, I talked him into leaving the hives in place and that I'd go over and check them from time to time. I've just come back from Richard's, and whoa! does he have a huge colony in the one hive that survived. Plenty of honey, possibly partly because they 'robbed out' the dead hive and sucked it dry of all its stores of honey. And I just put in a slab of pollen. I have to say, though, that they seem pretty mean, so we'll see how easy it is to manage them when I start working them later this spring. This was a package that came from the deep South and may be Africanized. If so, the hive will be a candidate for 're-queening' with one of our Long Island queens later in the season.
