Perspective

Well, it's been rainy and blustery lately (a typical Thanksgiving week in Seattle!), but we woke up to sunshine today. Looking at this picture of beehives taken around 1900, our weather is downright pleasant and mild!

We hope you (and your bees if you keep them) are having a peaceful holiday weekend.

Note: The image is from Cornell University Library's collection and has no known copyright restrictions.

Heading into Winter

I just read a couple of interesting posts on other beekeeping websites about bees in winter. The first is a thorough overview about what honeybees' lives are like during the wintertime, with details on how they cluster to stay warm and when and why they'll leave the hive in the colder months. See this page on All Things Plants for more details.

Then from Bee Rancher Buzz, a bee blog based in San Francisco comes a little tip about bee-friendly gardening as we head into winter. If there's something flowering in your garden, why not leave it for the bees? The blogger talks about letting herbs flower to give the bees a late-season treat. We did this with herbs this year as well as with some veggies in the garden that went to seed. In particular, we found that the bees loved fennel when it flowered. It may be a bit late for us Seattle gardeners to leave much to the bees, but if you're doing some cleanup and find something that's still flowering, why not leave it a little longer for our bee friends?

Tea for Bees

We're seeing honeybees on clearer, warmer parts of the day, but it's getting to be that time of year where we just have to hope there are enough bees in the colony to keep each other warm through the winter and that there's plenty of honey, too. We're pretty sure they have a good amount of honey, and Trish did decide to supplement their stores with a bit of bee tea.

Instead of just serving up plain old sugar water, Trish uses 1 part organic chamomile tea to 2 parts organic sugar. In the spring, it would be 1 to 1, but a thicker syrup is better this time of year because it requires less energy for the bees to convert the thicker syrup to honey. She also adds lemon to bring the pH of the sugar closer to the pH of honey. Then she adds a pinch of salt, which reduces the strain on their metabolism (according to Gunther Hauk). Finally, she adds a tablespoon of honey she saved from the beehive last year; this contains important enzymes for the bees.

Over the past week, the bees have consumed 1 pint of bee tea.

To Feed or Not to Feed

This morning while I finished up a craft project I'd started the night before, Trish went to the Ballard Farmers Market (if you check out their website, you may feel inspired to get hold of some fresh produce right now as they've posted photos of delicious-looking fall vegetables!). She got to chatting with a vendor who was selling honey, and he said the flurry of activity we've seen around the hive lately is probably robber bees.

He also said that we should be feeding the bees because there hasn't been much of a nectar flow for the last two months. Trish came home and did some reading on the subject because while commercial beekeepers feed their bees regularly (since the bees' honey gets harvested), we figured our backyard bees should have enough of their own honey to be eating well throughout the winter.

First, Trish looked at Toward Saving the Honeybee by Gunther Hauk. He's her favorite bee expert as he led the bee workshop she attended back in 2010, and he's an internationally known beekeeper who specializes in biodynamic and organic methods. He says that converting sugar to honey is exhausting to bees, so it's preferable not to feed them sugar water unless you must. To quote Hauk: "Only on rare occasions--when a colony is in danger of starving in late winter--do I mix some sugar with honey and a mild herb tea made with chamomile, sage, and a pinch of salt."

She then consulted Abbe Warre's Beekeeping for All (also available as a free PDF download from a natural beekeeping site in the UK). Warre suggests that with the design of his hive, bees can survive on a smaller store of honey in the first place because the honey they've stored is more readily accessible as the hive is more compact--the bees aren't using up energy to reach the honey, etc. Warre says the bees are kept "safe from overexertion."

We're interested to find out what other beekeepers do in terms of feeding or not feeding bees in the fall to help them through the winter. Trish sent a question out to some beekeeping friends of hers, and we welcome ideas from any beekeepers who are reading this. Do you feed your bees in the fall and/or wintertime?