Five Ways To STOP Your Bees DYING In Winter

In this video, I'm going to tell you 5 things you need to do to stop your bees dying in winter. Number 1, don't use late season matings. If you're relying on your only colony of bees to produce a late season queen to go out to get mated, the weather might be okay, but the drone quality and the number of drones late on in the season isn't anywhere near as good. For where I am in North Wales, I cut that off in August now. 1st of August, I say the bees can no longer produce any decent quality queens. Now that's not to say that they won't produce a good quality queen there, but when you're doing it in terms of large numbers, you do see that the proportion of good queens coming out definitely reduces the further you go into the season. I would say this is the number one reason why colonies fail in the winter, is because you've relied on a late season mating and that mating has failed, and it means that your colony has dwindled. Now I see people saying that's colony collapse disorder or it's isolation starvation. If you're going into your colony at this point of the year and you see a few little spots of brood around, a tight cluster of bees, whether it's alive or dead, and a queen that doesn't look very good, almost certainly a late season mating that's gone wrong and it's cost you your colony of bees. If you find yourself in that position where they're trying to swarm or they did swarm and you've got a colony of bees that's dwindling as you go into August, buy yourself a proven mated queen wherever you are in the world. Get it in and that really can recover the colony. Might cost you £40, but if you lose your entire colony, the waste is significantly greater. Second on my list is treating for varroa. Now, this is the biggest single change that I made in my beekeeping, and that is bringing forward my varroa treatment schedule to align with what the bees want, not with my own personal needs in terms of maximizing the honey crop. And I brought that forward again to around the middle of August is my cutoff in North Wales. Now I sacrificed quite a lot of honey by doing this, definitely in the first couple of years, because it meant that after the 15th of August I can no longer take honey off those colonies if I'm using a treatment that doesn't allow it. So I use Apivar. As soon as the Apivar strips go on, that's it, no more honey can come off for that entire year, and I leave the bees to it. It's counterintuitive and you think, well, you're putting your strips in early, so that's going to minimize your honey crop. And it's exactly the reverse that actually takes place, not in that year but in the following year. I'm going to do a separate video on this one because there's quite a bit more detail in there, but in order to make sure that your bees don't die over winter, you need to treat for varroa, but you need to treat at the right time. I see it all over the place, people saying, well, my bees died over winter, and you say, well, when did you treat for varroa? And they say, back end of September, early October, because I I get my honey crop, I get the bramble, I get a little bit of ivy, and I've taken all my honey off, and then I do my varroa treatments. Far, far too late. If you consistently do that, you'll end up with more colonies dying over winter. And the best thing about this bit of advice as well is what you lose in the late season honey crop, you gain it back the following spring. The colonies are booming. You'll see them bubbling out over the tops of the boxes. That is as a result of you taking action and making sure that the first and second round of winter bees that the bees produce going into winter is as healthy as they can possibly be and they're not impacted by the viruses that varroa carry with them. You're never going to get rid of varroa totally, but make sure that you take action early on in the season and you'll thank me once you get into spring. Oh, well, I didn't get stung there, that was just a bee checking me out and then I poked myself in the eye. So what I was saying is you will thank me when you get to spring, unlike these bees over here that are a little bit annoyed that I'm doing videos in their apiary. Number three on my list is make sure your bees are well fed going into winter, but do not overfeed them. Again, I see this a lot: people putting forty, fifty liters of syrup into a colony and then wondering why their bees are struggling to make it out of the winter. You need to ensure that the bees have enough food. You need to give them the feed at the right time, but you do need to make sure that you're not overfeeding them. So my regime here is, as I said, I do my varroa treatments fifteenth of August. I take off all of the honey, I cram the bees down into a single brood box, and I give them 12 liters of 2:1 sugar syrup. I do that at the same time as I give them the varroa treatments, and at the same time that I'm clustering them down and condensing them down into a single box. It seems a little bit manic at that point, but I find condensing down the colony so much and giving them the Apivar strips and giving them the feed at the same time, within about a week they sort themselves out and the colonies come through really, really well. What I then do is I leave the bees to it. Because I've fed them so early in the year and because I've treated them so early in the year, they've still got the back end of the bramble up in North Wales, and wherever you are in the UK, they're still going to have the ivy to come after that. So you've got this natural feed, they're going to go out and forage on the ivy, bring in the pollen, bring in the nectar, and the bees are able to almost self-regulate at that point. I find after that first feed of 12 litres of syrup, I rarely need to feed. Now if it just rains throughout the whole of August and September, I would go back and I would do another like 6 or 7 litres of 2:1 syrup, but I would leave it at that. I'm not going to give you a specific weight there because everything's so variable. Are you on Langstroth, National, single brood, double brood, poly, metal roofs, whatever? Too many variables there for me to give you a good weight. You need to just work out what is suitable for your bees. And then my advice to you is err on the side of caution, and then if the bees need it, use fondant as an emergency top-up over the winter. Fondant is so good over the winter, but it's even better in the spring because what it means is that Bees can feed, they've got as much carbohydrate as they want, and then when it comes to the point in the year where the nectar's coming back in, you can just remove that feed. You don't need to remove, say, a whole frame of stores, because then you have to mess around thinking, what am I going to do with a frame of stores? And your freezer quickly fills up. That's my method. Feed on the 15th of August, 12 litres of 2:1 sugar syrup, leave them the IV, top up with 6 litres if you need to. I generally don't. And then around January, February, once you're hefting it, assess the weight of your beehives and add fondant if necessary. Number 4 on my list is beehive configuration. I won't go into too much detail on this, but all I will say is insulate your beehive, but make sure above the cluster is the most insulated. If you just insulate the walls and think, well, I've wrapped them all up and they're really nice and warm, and you've not insulated the top of that cluster, so where the crown board sits more than the walls, Then all that's going to happen is you're just going to get condensation sitting underneath the crown board and dripping on the bees. Simple feed for me is the poly Ashforth feeder used as a crown board, loads of insulation, open mesh floor beneath, and that is how I set my colonies up for North Wales. And then my final tip for you is make sure you're regularly hefting your beehives. As I said, I go in and feed them in August, go and do the heft in September, assess whether you can feed them more sugar syrup, Get them up to their maximum weight that you want them at, and then continually heft your bees. Don't go into your colonies in February and find a big stack of dead bees. You need to go in, I would recommend once a month for November, December, January, and then once you're getting into February, I would be going there pretty much every week and giving them a heft. There's nothing wrong with opening your colonies of bees up in January or February if it's 8 or 9 degrees Celsius for like 10 seconds just to put some fondant on. Don't let your bees starve, and the way that you assess that is that you get used to how much a healthy beehive should weigh. Fondant late on in the season, really good insurance policy, and it means that you don't end up with dead bees in spring. If you enjoyed that video, found it useful, please give the thumbs up, hit the subscribe button, and hopefully I'll see you next time.