A Hard Winter for Bees


This winter got off to a very funky start. Warm, cold, warm and now freezing.

My garlic is up three inches and frozen that way. I was recently reassured that garlic survives pretty much anything.

We’ll see.

Not so, though, for bees. Last year we lost a hive to cold and starvation. With the extended warmth of this strange winter, we had to feed them profuse amounts of bee tea to keep them fed and actively storing new nectar to prevent them from consuming their stash that was stored for winter.

If this had been a usual fall into winter, the chill would have been a signal for the girls to oust the drones (who just eat) and to hunker down to conserve energy and keep warm in a cluster around the queen. Their metabolisms would have slowed a bit and they would have kept the hive heated inside by circulating around each other.

Instead they have been out and about, searching for nectar (we recently saw girls coming in with their sacks full of pollen from the willows that were budding in the aberrant warm weather).

All of this activity makes gals thirsty and they drank and ate their way through November and December. Very alarming.

Then, we get hit with the cold. This past weekend I was at the PASA (Pennsylvania Association of Sustainable Agriculture) Conference and heard that one beekeeper from Pennsylvania has lost half of his 1,500 hives so far this season.

Pretty devastating.

We don’t want to go into the hives right now to inspect because it’s so cold. The last time we took a peek, the new top hive feeders we added (which allow for internal feeding inside the hives) was full of frozen bee tea. And it didn’t seem like there was much activity at all.

We’ll check again on the next sunny, warm day and keep our fingers crossed until then. —

Peggy O’Brien

 

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