Winter — Beekeeping — Home Sweet Bees

Bees eat a sugar patty and festoon under the hive lid at the end of winter.

End of winter is a challenge for most beekeepers, including me. It is so tempting to want to open up the hives to see how the bee colonies in my garden are doing but it is not a good idea. Bees have carefully sealed up their homes in fall and, if opened late winter, they don't have the worker bee numbers, or energy, to reseal their homes.

To make sure my bees don't starve towards the end of winter, I add a two-inch wired shim to the top so I can easily feed them if I think they are running out of food. The shim also gives me an easy way to peek into the hive and see my bees, something I love to do.

On this particular February 2016 sunny day, the girls were festooning, or hanging together under the lid over a sugar patty I had given them earlier. By peeking under the lid I did not break their sealed home and I could easily check to see if they were making it through winter.

So nice to see them still alive and well!

Charlotte

One of the recipes I like to make for my honeybees is sugar patties. They serve to absorb moisture inside the hive in winter and, when placed correctly, can supplement honey when stores run out.

After breaking my dominant right wrist September 2015, I knew I couldn't stir the wet sugar to make the patties. Enter my beekeeping friend David who one day in November showed up with pie tins full of sugar patties for my girls.

"Let them dry out for a couple of days," he said, stacking them on my garage work table.

My stack of winter sugar patties ready to place in hives.

Some beekeepers object to feeding bees anything additional over winter. Having lost one colony to winter starvation, I prefer to give them the sugar patties so they don't starve. They will eat honey first so the sugar patties are for when they run out.

To make sure they can access it, the sugar patties have to be placed over the cluster, which may or may not be in the center of the hive.