Fall is coming quick which means it’s time to start thinking about fall beekeeping! Here are some resources to have on hand as you start preparing your beehives for the changing of seasons.
The University of Guelph has a fantastic collection of beekeeping videos. Here’s one about Feeding Bees and Overwintering!
Fat Bees Skinny Bees
If you’re looking for a good read about nutrition, Doug Somerville produced Fat Bees Skinny Bees, a manual on honey bee nutrition for beekeepers.
Honey Bee Suite is on of our favourite resources! In addition to writing and maintaining Honey Bee Suite, Rusty Burlew is the director of the Native Bee Conservancy, a non-profit organization dedicated to education about wild pollinators. She also write articles for various bee publications including American Bee Journal, Bee Craft (the Journal of the British Beekeepers Association), 2 Million Blossoms, Bee Culture, IBRA’s Bee World, Countryside and Small Stock Journal, The Serbian Beekeeper, and An Beachaire (The Irish Beekeeper). In addition, she frequently speaks to groups about bees and other pollinators.
Below are a two blog posts you should read to better understand Winter Bees and Fall Bee Behaviour.
What makes honey bees aggressive?
If your bees have been docile all spring and summer and they’ve started becoming quite feisty, this blog post lists some factors as to why this is happening including: robbing, dearth, and queenlessness.
Winter Bees
“As beekeepers, we tend to underestimate the importance of winter bees. We are especially unconcerned late in August, just when the colony is on the brink of producing these winter wonders. On a sultry August afternoon when the cat is long and the air is too hot to move, the next brew may seem more important than the next bee. But that next bee may be the one to shepherd your colony into spring, long after the brew is forgotten.
So what about winter bees makes them so important? And what makes them different from any other bee? According to Remolina and Hughes, winter bees are workers that emerge near the end of the foraging season [1]. Rather than living six weeks like most of their summertime sisters, winter bees may live six months, or even longer. These are the bees that determine whether our colony will survive the winter. And because of that, we beekeepers need to pay them more attention [2].”
LIVE from the HIVE
We have been documenting some of our experiences in the field this summer through our LIVE from the HIVE series. In our latest video, we pulled honey from our hives and showcased 3 different methods that can be used.
