🐝 How To Prepare Bees For Winter – Essential Steps To Overwinter Strong Colonies | Episode One

Today I'm going to show you how to get your colonies ready for winter. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping and the beginning of a new series on how to prepare your colonies for winter. All I'm going to do in episode 1 is show you how to condense the boxes down into a wintering configuration. I'm not going to show you how to harvest your honey, but what I am going to do is I'm going to show you what the colony looks like before, It's quite a high stack, this one, and then I'm going to get it down into a suitable wintering configuration. Now you need to decide what is a suitable wintering configuration for you. I have tried numerous configurations going from a single National Deep to a double National Deep to a 14x12 with a National Deep on top, brood and a half, all different variations. And for me, I've settled on a single 14x12 box. Now just because that works for me doesn't mean that works for everyone, and I have to say 14x12, I'm not a huge, huge fan of it. And looking back, I kind of wish I hadn't gone back to 14x12. But then I would be back into the dilemma of should I have a single National Deep or a double National Deep for overwintering? And the 14x12, one of the really good things about the 14x12 I find is that it's a really good size for overwintering on a single box. However, the challenge, as you will see in this video, is how do you condense a 7 or 8-foot-high stack of boxes down into a single box without having tons of bees bearding outside the front? And what I will say is get your timing right, because bearding outside the front of the hive is not the end of the world. In fact, it shows that the bees have filled the box. What's a lot worse than bearding outside the front is your bees only filling 30% of the overwintering configuration that you're putting them in. So as with everything beekeeping, it's always a really fine balance between doing too much and doing too little. You need to find out what works for you, what works for your colonies, and match that overwintering box configuration to the size of your colonies going into winter. My advice though is always err on the side of they should be crammed into that box. Now this is episode 1. We're just going to talk about box configurations here, and I'm going to get inside the colony and I'm going to show you how I condense that down. And I'm going to show you how crammed I like to keep my colonies back end of August, early September, and then they start to naturally contract down. Further episodes in this series though, we're going to talk about varroa treatments. I'm going to be using Apivar on these as well, how you work out how much Apivar to use on a big colony like that. Then we're going to talk about feeding, whether you should start off with 1:1 syrup, 2:1 syrup, feeding fondant, and then we're just going to do regular updates on this colony as we move into winter. I'm not going to do weekly updates because not a lot changes after you do your varroa treatments and you condense them down and you get them fed. But we do regular updates on this colony as we go throughout the year. I thought this was a worthwhile series doing though, because although I've done separate videos on getting your bees ready for winter, I've never really shown it through all of the steps. Because the first step, like today you're going to see, it's going to look like chaos. There's too many bees to fit into that box. And I said before, I've got a little bit of a trick up my sleeve. And I'll cover that in this video here. But what I do is I use the feeder, my poly Ashworth feeder, to my advantage here. So what a lot of people would do in this situation is they would condense that down to, say, a double brood, or they'd leave one of the supers on, maybe leave 2 of the supers on, use some clearer boards, clear the bees down, and then you're progressively reducing the size of that configuration as you move towards winter. Now, in the commercial beekeeping world, very, very difficult to do that because you're adding in time, you're adding in inspections, you're adding in activities, and it just doesn't really work. So what I'm not going to do today is I'm not going to show you how I clear the boxes for my honey harvest. And people who watch this channel may well know why I'm not going to show you that one. But what I'm going to show you is the stack of bees before and then the stack of bees afterwards. But what I don't do is I don't leave any boxes on there to cater for all of those bees. But what I will do is temporarily upturn my poly Ashforth feeder and give the bees somewhere to cluster. And you will be amazed how many bees fit in an upturned poly Ashforth feeder. So much so that hopefully we're not going to get a huge amount of bearding, although we will get a little bit, I would imagine. Also, I said before, timing for this is very, very important. If you're taking an 8-foot stack of supers and you're going to condense that down to a single brood box with an upturned poly Ashforth feeder, do not do it when the weather is poor. You need to come up with a different solution. You're probably looking at double brood in that situation. You need to make sure the weather is set fair for doing this, because the last thing you want to do is condense everything down, have a big beard outside the front of your colony, and then you get thunderstorms. That is just the perfect way to kill your colony and to kill a lot of bees. But if the weather is set fair, this is a really, really good method, and what it gives you is supreme overwintering performance. Because the colony can manage its heat so well. That's what it's all about—getting the colony into a position where they can manage their heat, manage their stores going through winter, because you're making effective use of the space that they're in. Right, so enough of me talking. I'm going to get my bee suit on. I'm going to go and remove all of the honey from all of the boxes, and then I'll show you what the overwintering configuration looks like in this apiary. So the first thing that you need to do before anything else. Once you've taken your honey supers off is you need to get in there and you need to check to see everything is okay with the colony. Normal inspection activities here, checking for disease. Don't want to see any disease. If you're seeing disease, good time to cull the colony, good time to do any intervention that's needed. If there's no disease, ideally you want to see the queen. If you can't see the queen, you've seen worker brood, you've seen eggs, you've made sure they're queen right, you need to do that check Before you start going to the effort of congesting them down, feeding them, Apivar strips. There's no point in doing all of that if you've got a drone-laying queen, or if you've got laying workers, or anything that can go wrong with colonies throughout the season. So before you do anything else in this series, just make sure everything's fine. You've got a mated queen, there's no disease, good quality worker brood, you've seen eggs, all of the things that you check for on a standard inspection. Right, so this is the colony that we're going to get ready for winter. It's the 30th of August today. Not going to cover honey harvesting in this video, but we've got 1, 2, 3, 4 national deeps chock-a-block with honey. I'm going to remove all of the bees from all of those honey supers there. I'm going to take those honey supers off to be extracted, and I'm going to leave myself with just the poly Ashworth feeder and a 14x12 national brood box. I know you're thinking, how on earth are all of these bees going to fit in single brood box like that. But that is how I get my colonies ready for winter, by cramming them into a single brood box. Gives you really top quality overwintering performance. So you can see bees all the way to the top there. I'm going to clear all of these 4 national deeps, take them away, put them somewhere safe where they're well away from robbing, and I'm going to show you how to condense that colony down. Right, so there you go, that's the colony condensed down. 4 big boxes Absolutely jam-packed full of honey. Can't believe how much they packed in here. Really quite amazing. What you will find though at the moment is that a lot of bees not really sure what to do. They can't get in the front because there's not enough room. They're going to be bearding on the front, bearding out the entrance, probably bearding underneath as well. Need to leave them for a little while and just try and let them get orientated back to that spot so they know what's going on. So my winter configuration I take away the queen excluder. I'm gonna leave a single 14 by 12 brood box, and I'm gonna give the bees temporary space by upturning the poly Ashforth feeder. Now, before I do that, I'm gonna get some fondant. Can be straight old baker's fondant, simple as you like, but it's quite handy if it comes in a plastic wrap. Cut a little hole in it, and we're just gonna place that directly onto the frames here. Then we're gonna take our poly Ashforth feeder, And we're just going to upturn that directly on like this. Now you might be thinking this seems a little bit of a strange method, because if you've got the bees in your garden, what you can do here is you can just skip this step. You can pop your Apivar strips in, pop your syrup on, but you do need to make sure that you're doing it in good weather. So if the weather's set perfectly fair, feel free to just jump ahead here, get the Apivar strip straight away in, jump straight to episode 3, and jump straight in with sugar syrup feeding, 1 to 1, just to get that colony going. For me though, I have this interim step in here, and there's a really simple reason why I have this interim step in here. I go around all of my colonies, I do this to them, I take the honey supers away, I go and fill the back of the pickup truck full of honey, and I go and take that off to go and be extracted. What I can't cope with in the back of my pickup truck is 300 or 400 litres of syrup knocking around as well, because then I don't have enough space to put the honey supers. So I do this as a little bit of an interim. I'll go around, do all of my colonies like this. They've got 2 kilos of fondant on there. They're not going to starve. Gives them a chance just to get used to the normal amount of space that's in there. Buys me some time to go away and extract the honey, or at least go and put the honey away somewhere in the extraction room ready for extraction. And then the next day I can come back, stick the Apivar strips in, and move straight on to syrup feeding. Episode 2 of this series is going to be Apivar strips. Episode 3 is going to be syrup feeding. This is just the process that I use. So at this point, this is what you're highly likely to see. Lots of bearding outside the front, bees not really sure where to go, and lots of fanning from the bees. Going to see bees up in the air as well, and they're all going to be trying to get back into that colony. We're going to give it about half an hour here because I just want to show you how those bees manage to fit inside that Right, so I've deliberately cut that a little bit short. So what you're not seeing here is you're not seeing all of the bees in in the colony with a really nice tightly formed beard outside because they won't do that until late late in the evening. All these bees flying around here now are going to be thinking. What has happened to my beehive? It used to be a nice big stack of supers, loads of honey, loads of room for everyone, and now I can't get in because the entrance is so congested. What you need to do at this point is you need to have the confidence that your bees will mostly fit in there. You've got a lot of space up there in the polyashforth feeder, and you will get a little bit of bearding. So long as you're not doing this in terrible, terrible weather, you can safely leave the colony like this. Come back the next day, in a couple of days, and you will see how they've managed to cram themselves into this space. So for the purpose of this video, you can see the brood box is well and truly jam-packed full of bees now. Loads of bees on the front as well, still fanning away, trying to get all of those bees back. Entrance— they've not got a chance really getting in there at the moment. And then we've got a little cluster of bees down there. Another cluster of bees down there. You just need to have the confidence that all of those bees are going to come back, and I'll show you this in episode 2. You'll notice how many more bees are up there in the feeder. We're going to see a big cluster of bees up there. So there we go, simple as that. I know you're thinking, how did I clear the bees? And I'm not going to go into the detail. What I will say though is if you're using clearer boards, you can't just compress bees down using It doesn't work like that. So if you're not going to use the method of clearing that I've used, what you need to do is you need to take the frames out, shake them off, use a bee brush or something. You need some mechanical way of getting the bees off the frames into the air and then reducing the size of the overwintering configuration to suit you. If you think you're just going to take a 14 by 12 brood box and have 4 National Deeps and put a clearing board in between the 2, And say to the bees, right, I want you to compress down into a brood box. They're not going to do it. It just doesn't work like that. The bees will only go into what they consider to be a suitable space. And what I'm doing is I'm overcongesting them. Only a really temporary overcongestion, because a lot of these bees are going to die off in the short term. And it suits me as a beekeeper, and it gives the bees really good overwintering performance, and allows you to treat and allows you to feed that we're going to cover later on in the series. So there you go. It's as simple as that. I know you're all thinking, how did I clear those honey supers? And I reckon you can probably guess how I did it. I don't want to show it on camera though because I got so much abuse last time I did that clearing video. So not for YouTube. Definitely not going down that route again. But I think you'll agree it's quite impressive how you can condense that many bees from that many boxes into a single national 14 by 12 box with an upturned polyashforth feeder. And then it makes episode two even more effective. effective. And episode 2 is going to be how we treat for varroa mites, keeping them all in that same box. We're going to add Apivar strips in there. That gives you a really good mite drop because you've got so many bees moving around in the brood area. So I hope you enjoyed that video. Stay tuned for episode 2. As always, please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time.