Chapter 4
Section 4 of Beekeeping Do's and Don'ts by Ticknor Edwards. This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Autumn and Winter Management Autumn for the Bee Master begins directly the season's nectar flow has come to an end, and the last honey super has been removed from the hives.
The date varies according to the district. If there be a good stretch of heather land within a mile or so of the apiary, the foragers may be kept busy right to the end of July, or sometimes well on into August. Where heather is plentiful, even though it be several miles off, out of reach of the bees in the ordinary way, it will usually well repay the trouble involved in taking the hives to it.
What is called heather honey, however, is the exclusive product of the true heather plant or ling, not of the heath, sometimes spoken of as bell heather. It is important to know how to distinguish these. The heath is the bell or pitcher-shaped blossom that covers whole provinces at this time with intensely brilliant purple. There is honey of sorts to be made from it, but its quality is not to be compared with that from the ling,
whose inflorescence cannot be called brilliant at all. The ling bears an infinity of small spiky blooms of a sombre washed-out pink, whose combined effect is very inferior to that of the bell heather. But the honey from it is excellent, and so dense that it is useless to attempt its extraction from the comb by the centrifugal machine. Only hives superred with sections, therefore, should be taken to the moors, if the wasteful system of crushing the combs is to be avoided.
But in ordinary districts, where neither ling nor bell heather is available, the nectar flow very seldom lasts beyond the end of June at the outside. As soon as it becomes evident that the supply has come to an end, the beekeeper should begin seriously to consider what is before him. If there can be said to be a cardinal secret in the achievement of success in apiculture, it lies undoubtedly in the proper preparation of the hives for wintering. To winter well and come out in the following spring strong and ready for another season's work, a stock should go into winter quarters possessed of a young vigorous fertile queen, a large population consisting almost wholly of late-bred bees,
and a store of good ripe sealed honey weighing about 25 pounds to 30 pounds. Unless the winter population consists mainly of young bees, the early batches of brood in the following year will not have enough nurse bees to care for them, while shortage of stores at the same period will mean that brood raising will be undertaken by the stock in but half-hearted fashion, and progress will be slow in consequence. To ensure that sufficient sealed honey be left in the brood nests for wintering, an inspection should be made when the last supers are being removed. If the season has been a good one, nearly every brood comb should have its upper part filled with honey forming a sort of arch,
and in five or six of the central frames at least, the lower region of the comb should still contain brood in various stages of development. Probably also, the outermost frames on each side will be filled, or nearly filled, with honey, one or two of them perhaps being solid blocks from wood to wood. Now here, the novice will be beset by a great temptation. It would be so easy to take out these fat combs and extract them, so adding materially to the honey take for the year. And yet, that brings us perhaps to the most imperious, don't, in the whole of this little book.
The honey that the bees store in the super racks is yours to the last ounce, but always leave the bees the whole of what they have stored in their brood chambers. Beekeepers do not sufficiently realise the importance of wintering their stocks on plenty of sound, mature honey. On a first thought, it may seem a clever move to take the honey worth perhaps two shillings per pound, and feed to the bees in its place sugar syrup, which can be made for sixpence. But I am convinced nature's own provender turns out much the cheaper in the long run. It must be remembered that on the maintenance of the high condition of the queen bee and her helpers throughout the winter and early spring, depend the vigour and stamina of the future generations.
And I believe the deterioration that one so often observes in the spring condition of stocks of bees is largely caused by inferior artificial winter food. Of course, after a very bad season, autumn may find the stocks with very little sealed honey in the brood chambers, in which emergency, if there be no natural food available for the purpose, the necessary weight of winter stores must be made up by sugar syrup. In this case, the artificial food should be given as rapidly as possible to the required amount not later than the end of September, when all stocks should be packed warmly down with plenty of thick woollen quilts, and left absolutely undisturbed, if possible, until well on into the succeeding spring. Indeed, the great test of good bee-manship is just this ability of the bee-man and his bees to forget all about each other during the close season. The former sure that his chargers, well-privisioned and snug in a warm dry hive, will be thoroughly able to take care of themselves.
It has been said that, to winter well, all stocks must be strong. If any weak lots exist in the apiary, they should either be united to other and more populous colonies, or joined up together in twos or even threes. This work is best carried through in the early autumn directly the honey flow is over. The lots to be combined should be gradually brought together side by side, moving them no more than two or three feet on each day of flying weather. Then, choosing a fine mild day, go through the stocks, selecting the frames containing the most brood, and put the best ten in one of the brood chambers together, alternating the combs of the two lots.
As a precaution to ensure amicable union, each of the frames, as it is lifted up crowded with bees, may be thoroughly dusted with flour from a dredger, or sprayed with a scent atomiser. The object of this is to give the different families the same appearance and odour, and so promote friendly relationships. But in nine cases out of ten, a good fumigating from the ordinary smoker will provide all that is necessary, and this, of course, they will have had before the hives were opened. In joining up stocks of bees in this way, one or other of the queens may be searched for and removed, the youngest and most vigorous being allowed to assume leadership of the combined forces. But if there is no difference in the value of the queens, it is not strictly necessary to go to this trouble. They may just be turned in together when it will be a case of the weakest going to the wall.
When selecting the ten best frames for the united colony, regard must be had to the presence of stores as well as brood. With a little practice, the beekeeper will soon be able to judge by the eye alone the contents of a given amount of honeycomb, and so be able to arrive at an estimate of what is needed. Next to strength of population and a larder filled with the right sort of food, the successful wintering of bees depends on their being housed in thoroughly weather and cold-proof hives. Don't have anything to do with hives, any of whose walls consist of a single thickness of wood, unless you intend to supply them with a second and outer casing when winter comes. It is true that bees contained in single-wall hives will survive the ordinary English winter and build up again moderately well in the spring.
But it is always at the expense of much vitality and consumption of stores that would have been saved had their hives been scientifically constructed. The double-walled and double-floored hive, with or without packing material, is better for bees in every way. Not only is such a hive heat-retentive, but it defies what is the chief enemy of bee-life in the quiescent time of the close season, damp. The brood nest of a double-walled hive will remain dry when the interior of single-walled hives may be reeking with moisture. The true reason for this is likely to be overlooked by the novice.
It is not that moisture penetrates from without, although that is quite possible with hives made from thin, poorly seasoned timber. It is that single walls always remain cold, and the warm vapour incessantly given off by the cluster of bees precipitates its moisture on these walls instead of passing harmlessly out of the hive entrance as it should do. The inner surfaces of the brood chamber, being thus rendered permanently damp and cold into the bargain, these communicate their chill, sodden condition to everything they enclose. Stores of honey absorb the moisture, the combs sweat, fermentation often sets in, and dysentery may break out in the colony. The stores of pollen become mildewed and therefore spoiled.
The winter cluster of bees with the queen in its midst feels the general chill-humidity of its surroundings. Its temperature falls, and the bees have to consume more of the deteriorated stores to maintain the necessary warmth. This means, at the very least, an expenditure of vitality that would not occur under proper conditions. And when the time comes for the stock to get busy in the spring, its members are already half worn out by winter difficulties, instead of being rested and ripe and eager for the task ahead of it. Probably half the mortality which occurs among stocks of bees is directly due to neglect or ignorance of this housing problem.
Good hives will not by themselves ensure success in apiculture, other things being absent. But there is no doubt they will go a very long way towards securing the success we all desire. To autumn belongs most properly an operation which also bears very directly on the successful management of bees. This is the requeening of those stocks known to be headed by a mother bee past her second year of full activity, or where a colony has shown undesirable traits such as lack of good working qualities or bad temper.
The requeening of a stock is always attended by a certain amount of risk, as the bees may resent the introduction of the stranger and either severely maul her or even kill her outright. But if the old queen bee removed at least 24 hours beforehand and the new queen bee protected by some device for another day or so after her insertion, the stock will usually accept her without any trouble. There are many different ways of contriving this, but one of the best of these is the old plan of using a queen cage, which may be merely a small cylinder of perforated zinc closed at the upper end but open at the lower end, this end, however, being plugged with half an inch of stiff candy. The cage containing the queen bee is pushed down between two of the central combs and the hive closed.
The bees of the colony will set to work to eat away the candy and the queen bee thus eventually released. But by the time this happens, the stranger will have acquired the general odor of the hive and will be allowed to assume duty with the rest without opposition. When requeening, it is sound policy to obtain queens of guaranteed fertility and good strain from some reliable queen bee breeder at a distance, and so import new blood into the apiary. There is a danger, prevalent indeed in early spring, but still more likely to evince itself in autumn, particularly just at the conclusion of the nectar flow, which the beekeeper must carefully guard himself against. This is the tendency of hives to rob each other.
It is usually the weak colonies which are thus raided by the strong, and this forms an additional reason for allowing no weak stocks to exist in the apiary. When a hive is being attacked, the first effective device to employ is to create an artificial rainstorm all over it and round it by means of a watering pot with a fine rose. This will temporarily drive off the aggressing host. Then close the entrance of the hive to about half an inch, place a double handful of loose hay upon the alighting board, and hang over the face of the hive a cloth sprinkled freely with carbolic acid. In addition to these deterrents, it is a good plan, if possible, to enclose the hive in a sort of tent of netting or wire gauze.
This should stand about six feet high, but should be open at the top. The bees of the hive will find their way in and out, but the robbers will be effectually excluded. In cases of robbing, however, prevention is always much easier than cure. Carelessness on the part of the beekeeper is nearly always its exciting cause. The interior of a hive may have been unduly exposed, or syrups spilt on the ground when filling feeders, or scraps of comb, propolis, etc., allowed to lie about the vicinity instead of being punctiliously removed at the end of a manipulation.
All these are incentives to robbing, especially in autumn, and it is a wise plan at this season to defer all necessary operations such as feeding and removal of supers until the close of the day. End of section 4
