Beekeeping Winter Preparation

Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Today I'm going to be giving you my top 20 tips for what beekeepers should be doing in winter. Setting up new apiaries. Now, if you're interested in kind of going out and setting up new apiaries, now is definitely the time of the year to do it. You don't want to be getting bogged down with this when the bees are at their most needy throughout It's very easy to move bees in the winter as long as it's kind of relatively mild. You don't want to be moving them when it's kind of very, very cold because then there's a possibility that they could drop off the cluster. But as long as it's above kind of 6 or 7 degrees, you're pretty much safe to move the bees. So one of the really good things to do is kind of go out, look for new apiaries, set them up, talk to landowners, farmers. Although they're busy all year round, it's probably their quietest time of year. So if you're looking at setting up new apiaries, now's the time of year to do it. Manage existing apiaries. Now, I don't know how many times this has happened to me in the past, but I work throughout the season, I go to the apiaries, and I think, I wish I could do that, I wish I had the time to do this. I might want to put a gate in, I might want to level the ground out. There's numerous things that I kind of want to do, and I always notice them throughout the season, so I tend to jot them down, and then in the winter I go out and I actually make these changes to the apiaries. It's a great time to do it, it's very quiet, you've got a lot of time on your hands, so get out there and make the changes that you need to make. Review the data. Now, when I first started beekeeping, I definitely didn't do this, and you need a good few kind of years realistically to get any good information out of it. But once you've built up that data over the years, it's a really good time during the winter to actually sit back and kind of review that data. Now, the data is completely entirely up to you in terms of what you want to collate and what you want to kind of review over the winter, and it's completely dependent on what your drivers are and what your targets are for beekeeping. For me, I obviously kind of track like the weights and the amount of honey that I'm extracting from each hive. That tends to be the main one for me to review, and then I can use that information to kind of establish whether I think an apiary is performing well or whether I should reduce the numbers or completely remove the bees from that apiary and go to a better performing apiary. Summer is the time to collate all of that data, keep it on your inspection sheets when you're doing your extraction records. Make sure that it kind of links back to the apiary, and then over the winter you can build yourself a nice spreadsheet or do it kind of by hand or whichever way you want to do it and actually review where your best apiaries are and how your colonies are performing. Plan for next season. Now hopefully while you're kind of working your way throughout the beekeeping year, you're kind of building up these plans on what you want to do for the next season. Write them down as you go along, it's a really kind of helpful tool. The amount of things that I think of and then forget is Ridiculous. So write them down throughout the season, and then at the beginning of the season you can put together an actual plan for what you want to achieve, and then it gives you kind of something to set targets against. So for me, for next season, I mean, I want to maintain my colonies at 150 hives. My previous targets have been to kind of expand, expand, expand. I've got to a point now where I definitely don't want to extend— expand any further, for the time being anyway, and I want to maximize my honey crop. So that is my target for next year, and that's going to influence what I do in the upcoming beekeeping season. And if you write them down and have them as specific targets, you're much more likely to follow them. So for example, in previous seasons, if I found a colony and they were going to swarm, I would have made a split because my target was to increase. So instead of having one hive, I could have 2 or 3 hives, but I lose probably all of the honey that I'm going to get from those 3 splits. Whereas this season, I'm gonna— if I find a colony that's gonna swarm, I'm gonna potentially manage that in a completely different way. I'll do a swarm manipulation technique that means that I'm not gonna lose the honey, but also more importantly, I'm not going to increase those hives any further. So I might do a demerare or another technique, kind of a vertical split within the hive. So it's just good to kind of sit down, actually get very clear realistic targets for the season, write them down, and try and stick to them. Place your order for bees. Now it's probably a little bit late for that in the season now. It's coming up to kind of end of January, early February. Realistically, you want to do that kind of before Christmas, but it's not, it's not too late. You can still do that now. But if you're looking for an increase, you're looking to buy packages, nucs, full colonies, you want to get those orders in as soon as you possibly can so you can get them as soon in the season as you possibly can, which means that they've got a longer time to build up and you're more likely to get a honey crop off them. So if you're thinking about expanding and you're not going to do that all organically through your own stock and you're going to buy in from other suppliers, get it down, place those orders and get them in now. Buy new equipment. Now this is my favourite thing, I love buying new equipment. Winter's an excellent, excellent time for doing that. A lot of the major suppliers have sales on and you can pick up equipment at a much, much cheaper price than you would normally within the year. So for example, if you've got 2 or 3 supers per colony, and you had issues with having to extract them and replace them the previous season, why not buy an extra couple of supers? They're a lot cheaper at this time of year. You can get seconds in the sales, second seeders, and you can get like kind of poly equipment very, very cheap at this time of year. So again, it comes back down to very suitable planning. Look at what you want, write it down early in the year, preferably kind of November, December time, and then wait for those really good sales to come up kind of January. Middle of January, kind of around that time. Assemble your equipment. So once you've got all of this lovely new shiny equipment, there's no better thing than to sit down and assemble it all and get it put together. Obviously, that's assuming that you've got the space to store it. If you haven't, that's going to have to wait until you kind of need it later on in the season. But I do recommend, I mean, if you can assemble all your equipment and store it somewhere in the winter, get it ready, it's such a good way to do it. I spend many winter evenings putting together frames, putting the foundation on. It's quite monotonous and it's quite boring, but it's just a kind of good way to do it, good use of your time, so that when you come to needing those supers or those additional brood boxes in the season, they're sat there and they're ready to go. The bees won't wait for you. So if a bee— if a colony's swarming because it hasn't got enough space in the brood area, and what you're thinking about doing is adding an additional brood box, the bees aren't going to wait for you to go home and kind of screw and glue that cedar brood box together and make up the frames. Probably going to take you a couple of days to get all of that done, so have it there, have it ready, ready for when the bees need it. Count your hives. Now that sounds like a really, really simple one. Surely everyone knows how many hives they've got, right? And kind of, yeah, I know roughly how many hives I've got, but what I actually do is I make a very, very rigid assessment at 2 key dates in the year. Now these dates could be kind of whenever you want really. The dates that I choose is the 1st of October And the 1st of April. So I say on the 1st of October, how many colonies do I have? And then that's my number for colonies going into winter. I tend to not lose colonies kind of after the 1st of October, tend to not lose really any kind of throughout the beekeeping season. But that's my date and I keep that very firm each year. And then I use the 1st of April as another date to say, right, how many colonies successfully got through the winter? Um, and then I can kind of model my loss— my losses on a year-by-year basis. And then that gives you a really good feel as to kind of which apiaries are performing better in terms of losses, which kind of breed of queen. So if you're breeding your own queens or you're buying in separate queens and you're tracking those, which colonies overwinter better. It's all about kind of collating that data and using it effectively. But if you have those fixed rigid dates each year, it gives you very clean data. There's no kind of changing it at all. So for example, if I changed my 1st of April date to my 1st of February date, I would instantly increase the number of colonies that successfully get through the winter. I'd be kind of smearing the data a little bit, and that's not what it's all about. So I keep those set rigid dates each year, and then that gives me really, really accurate kind of information on the actual losses that I've had. Do a stock take. So this obviously comes before buying your equipment, but it's very, very useful to go around and actually do a stock take of what you've got and what you need, and And this is kind of for everything that doesn't include the hives. So what I do is I'll go around and obviously I'll count all my hives, and then I'll count all of my spare supers, all of my spare brood boxes, and I'll kind of establish how many supers and brood boxes I've got per hive. I work to a number. I like to keep at least 4 supers per hive. It's quite a high number, and in some years if I'm kind of expanding, I don't necessarily hit that number. That's just the number that I work to. But I'm talking to a stocktake on absolutely everything. Look at your queen excluders, look at your feeders, look at kind of all the other ancillary items that you need to keep bees. Do a stocktake, work out actually how many you need to kind of keep a successful beekeeping operation. And that, I mean, that works even if it's just kind of 1 or 2 hives in the back of your garden. If there's a key piece of equipment missing that you didn't have last year, I mean, write that down throughout the year, get it in the sales. You just kind of, you need to prepare as best as you possibly can. for a smooth beekeeping season, as opposed to getting into the season and realizing you haven't got a certain piece of kit that you need, or you've only got 10 clearer boards when you want to clear 30 colonies at a time. It's just kind of establishing what equipment you do have, what equipment you need, and then topping it up to make sure that you've got enough for when you actually need it. Clean and sterilize your equipment. So while you're doing your stocktake, you can put all of your dirty equipment to one side and then do some thorough cleaning on it. So if you've got wooden equipment, you might want to scorch it. You definitely don't need to scorch it each year. Obviously, if there's been any disease in any of your hives, then that will be quarantined and that will go straight for scorching anyway. If you've got poly equipment, you might want to clean it with a soda solution, as I've showed in a previous video. It's just a good time to be able to clean it. Wax comes off a lot easier when it's cold. When it's warm and in season, the wax tends to smear a lot better, so cold weather is actually really, really helpful for cleaning beeswax. Keeping equipment, and that includes kind of your queen excluders, your hive tools, any of your boxes. Just makes it a lot easier. And obviously the big benefit that you've got in the winter is that you've got time. If you're not kind of busy keeping your bees, you can do other stuff and keep things clean. So clean and sterilize all your equipment. Research new processes. So I do this every year. I kind of try and improve my kind of beekeeping vocabulary in terms of actual manipulations and techniques. So I'll look at other YouTube videos, I'll look online, I'll look at, uh, read different books, and I'll kind of see what other beekeepers are doing and how they're making beekeeping easier. So again, you have to align your learning of these new methodologies with your plans and targets for the season. So for example, this season I'm not doing any more expanding, so I'm kind of swatting up and reading about potential swarm manipulation techniques that don't include increase, so vertical splits within the hive. So I mean, I do Demarée anyway, but I'm looking for kind of other, other variants of that that I can add to my collection as a technique for a swarm manipulation that doesn't result in 2 colonies. And again, all it is is looking at what you actually need and what you're planning to do throughout the season and then topping up that information that you've got. And it doesn't help to top up information that you don't need. Obviously people enjoy kind of reading about beekeeping and seeing what other people are doing, understanding how other people are tackling varroa. It really comes to— I mean, you can have this as wide and as broad as you possibly like, but it's a good time to do it. It's a good time to write things down, say, right, I'm going to have a go at that this time, this season, and see how it goes. And then the big one is evaluate how it goes as well. Write down what you're doing and see if it was successful at the end of the year. There's no point learning stuff, putting it into practice, and then not really understanding if it was a good or bad tool to use. Kind of want to keep good records, write down exactly what you've been doing, what processes you've used, and then evaluate them at the end of the season. If they're no good, they go on the scrap heap. If they are good, you can expand them across other apiaries and colonies. Check on your bees. So while you're doing all of these other things, probably a good idea to maybe kind of go and check on your bees every now and again as well. There's no point learning all of this new stuff and buying your equipment if you're going to come back in the season and all your bees are dead. So regular checks on your bees, and it's completely dependent on how regularly you want to check up on them. My approach is as often as you possibly can, an absolute minimum once every 2 to 3 weeks. That's, that's kind of the rule that I go to. Obviously my apiaries are very, very close to me and it's quick for me to just kind of go up and check on them. When I say check though, I don't mean start taking the roof off, I don't mean, definitely don't mean pulling out any frames. Like, it's a very, very unintrusive form of checking. So all I will do is I might go up to the back of a hive, knock, knock, knock, and hear a gentle hum. That could be enough. That tells me there's bees in there. The next check that I would always do after that though is I would heft my hives. So at the beginning of winter, I weigh them to make sure that they're up to an adequate weight, but then kind of throughout the winter, I'll just give them a little bit of a heft. Now when you standardize all of your hives, it's very, very easy to tell when a hive is much lower in weight. So all I do is I kind of go up to it, I'll lift the hive up, I'll heft it, so then it's given me 2 key pieces of information. One, there's bees in there because I've got an audible hum coming out when I knock, and 2, there's sufficient stores in there. And that is all I mean by checking up on your hives. Don't do anything further than that. Now if you come to it and there's no audible hum and they're very, very light, Then of course, by all means, go in there and check and see if the bees are there. There's no point not opening the hive for fear of cold getting in and it causing damage to the bees if they're dead. Like, you need— if you need to get in there and take drastic action, and that might be feeding fondant or feeding any of the other kind of specialist bee feeds that are around, you need to go in there and do that. Obviously, if it's -10 degrees and snowing, it's going to be a little bit difficult, but do you mean The weather these days, it doesn't tend to be that cold in winter anyway. It's 12 degrees today and it's the end of January, so you could easily go into all of these hives and kind of check them if you wanted. And again, you don't need to be going through them frame by frame. You can just take the roof off, have a look at the crown board. That'll give you a good indication of what's going on. They might just be tightly clustered and they don't want to give you a bit of a roar when you knock on the door. But like I say, you want to do the least intrusive check that you possibly can to get a positive response that they're there. If they're not giving you that response, then you might need to dig a little bit further just to check that they're okay, but you're better off checking, making sure they are okay, because otherwise you'll get to the new season and you won't have any bees left. Make sure they're well fed. So I touched on this a bit in the previous post, you've got to make sure they're well fed. Obviously feed them up going into winter, check them throughout the year, do your checks throughout the winter, And make sure that there's adequate stores within the colony. I mean, there's a few kind of key times of the year where they're kind of at risk of running out of those stores. One of them is early spring, and that's the real key one. You need to make sure that they've got enough stores to see them through until they can start bringing in their own nectar of their own. But you don't want to overfeed, so then you're going to pollute your honey with any sugar syrup or any kind of feeds or anything like that. So it's a bit of a, a bit of a fine balance at that point in the season. But it's quite easy to manage if you're getting in there and just taking a look. And, and kind of March, March time, it's fine to kind of get in there and have a look and see what's going on. Review the previous season. So I touched on this before in various other kind of elements of this video, but it's good to sit down and do like a formal review of your season. And this kind of ties into your plan for the next season. If you've got your plan for the next season written down, then once you've completed that season and you move into the winter you've got a real good kind of crib sheet to go against them and actually give it a full review. Did you do what you planned to do? How well did it go? New processes that you implemented, how well did they go? I mean, if you sit down and do a full review of your season, you've got like a nice snapshot in time to kind of go back to and track that throughout the years. So it's good practice to sit down, review your season against the previous year's goals, and and kind of mark yourself on how well you think you performed, and then that helps you with your planning for the next season. Clean your honey extraction room. Now obviously, whenever you do any honey extraction, I clean the room before I actually start, and then once I've finished, I clean the room again. But where it hasn't had a lot of use over the winter months, I always like to give it a real, real deep clean. I mean, spend some time on it where I'm not pressured to doing other things and kind of get into all of the nooks and crannies. Give it a real, real deep clean, and you'll kind of reap the benefits of that when you come to extract your honey later on in the season. Also, review what doesn't work in your honey room. Maybe a certain layout's not working very well for you. You need to look at it from a kind of a lean approach and see how do my supers flow through that honey extraction room so that they're coming into the room, you're uncapping them, you're extracting them, you're stacking them back up, you're extracting your honey into buckets, you're storing your buckets. I mean, sit there and look at how that kind of process works out and see if you can do it any better. I mean, what I find really, really helpful for doing this is actually grid paper, and then you draw the items onto scale, and then you can kind of work out how they fit on that grid paper, and you can work out kind of numerous different configurations of your honey extraction room without actually having to go in and move the equipment around. So, so it's a good idea to kind of review how your honey room operates operates, set the configuration down and then tweak it if necessary. Service your honey extraction equipment. Now, this obviously doesn't apply to everyone, but if you've got big large-scale honey extraction machinery, and that even counts as kind of like a 4 to 6 frame extractor, it's a really good habit to get into of actually servicing that on a yearly basis. Now, that might mean as little as giving it a really, really good deep clean Checking that there's no kind of defects on there. I mean, it's like servicing your car. You're doing a bit of a tick list of all of the possible things that could go wrong with it and doing proactive maintenance on it so that it doesn't break down when it's in use throughout the season. So it's just a really, really good habit to get into. There's a number of kind of tick lists that you can use online for doing this, for kind of general service of machinery. But if you go in, tick through all of the items, then it puts you in a really good position going into the beekeeping season. Update your processes and procedures. Now, when I first started moving over to kind of large-scale honey extraction, obviously you need to complete a lot of processes and procedures in order to get your, um, your food hygiene rating. Um, and I went a little bit overboard on some of these processes and procedures, so much so that some of them I probably don't follow them to the extent that they're written down. And that was actually of the advice of the, um, the food hygiene people. So saying that certain things are actually overkill. So for example, what I had was I had a weekly inspection down to go in there, and that meant every week I had to go in and just look around, check for vermin, um, check for kind of any structural damage. I had various checks that I did, and the, the food hygiene officer said, well, it's really good that you're coming in here and doing that on a weekly basis, but it's a bit overkill. Do you know what I mean? What I'd expect you to do is prior to doing any honey extract Do those checks, and then if you find any of those issues, then you don't do your honey extraction. And I thought that was really good advice, and it obviously saved me going around there and doing a visit every week. I'm kind of there relatively often anyway, so I'll go in and kind of have a look, but I don't record it. So what I've done this year is I've updated my procedures based upon the guidance that I received from food hygiene. And all that means is that if your process says something, you should really be following that. And if it's overkill. Why do something that's not actually required? So on all of my processes, I kind of go through— they're all sat at revision A, and I go through, make the updates that I need to make, put them up to revision B, and then I can follow a nice new clean and lean process without any wasted time or energy. Explore new markets. Now, I love exploring new markets because I find beekeeping is not just about honey. I mean, there's honey, there's queens, There's nuc production, there's colonies, there's pollination contracts, there's cosmetics, there's beeswax wraps. There's tons of different kind of market opportunities that are there for anyone. And that goes from someone who's got kind of 1 or 2 colonies to everyone all the way up to driving a few thousand colonies who are pretty good at exploring those markets anyway. Identify which ones you're interested in, which ones kind of have a relatively easy route to market, which ones you think that you could actually manage that route to market, and sit down and maybe pick 1, 2 of them and decide that you're going to do that for next season. So that might be as simple as saying, right, I'm going to make some candles next season. What do I need to do to have enough wax to keep candles? So it might mean that when you go around checking on your bees, you have a little bucket. Every time you kind of scrape those top bars, you chuck a little bit of wax in the bucket, and it's surprising how, how much wax you can build up just doing that, just walking around with a bucket on each inspection. But if you hadn't sat down and kind of identified that as a target or a market you wanted to explore, you might just kind of not bother scraping that wax off or doing something else with it, and you wouldn't build up as much. So it's a really good time of year to explore those different markets and kind of see which one of those interests you. Planting for bees. Now I appreciate not everyone wants to do that, but it's a really good time to look into what you can potentially do to improve the biodiversity of plants in your area. I love doing this and I love kind of putting a strip in the garden, maybe at some of the apiaries I'll put some kind of self-seeding plants down with the owner's permission, but it's a good time to kind of sit back and review what you can actually do to improve available forage for your bees. Now that might even be talking to some farmers, saying to some farmers, Would you be willing to kind of plant a certain cover crop that the bees could use? So just have a think about what you can do to kind of improve the biodiversity in your area, kind of for all pollinator species, so not just honeybees. It's really good to give something back to the environment and kind of plant some additional plants and flowers. So that's it for today's video, another top 20 tips on what you should be doing as a beekeeper throughout the winter. I hope you enjoyed it. Please hit the subscribe button and I'll see you next time.