How To Prepare For The Beekeeping Season

It's the end of January and the beekeeping season is nearly upon us. In this video, I'm gonna give you all of my advice for getting prepared ahead of the season starting. So number 1 is make sure you buy your equipment early on in the year. And for me, when I say early on in the year, I mean at the end of the previous beekeeping season. I like to get mine in the October, November sales, get them really early, and then spend the time over Christmas, in early January into February, building all of that equipment. It's amazing how you get caught out in the season where You just don't have enough time to keep ahead of the bees by making sure that all of your frames have been melted down, all of the frames have been rewaxed, your boxes have been cleaned, your boxes have been scorched. You've done all of your maintenance. You maybe do some wax dipping as well. You need to concentrate on all of that throughout the season, and you need to sit down and do the hard maths to work out that you've got enough boxes to see you through. I've had this in so many years where you think, I'm just not going to do that. I'll do it as and when I need to. And then you get to the point in the season where you just realize that the bees are going to outpace you. You can't make up the frames quick enough, even if you work 24/7. So you need to get ahead of that curve, and you need to do that by making sure that you allocate a suitable space. Might be in your house, might be in your garage, might be in an out-apartheid, might be in an outbuilding, but somewhere that you can stack and store and keep your equipment and build it ahead of time. That's going to get you into a really nice position and make it so much easier throughout the season. Now, the next piece of advice I would give is to have a plan. How many colonies have you got at the beginning of the year? How many colonies do you want to have at the end of the year? Are you focusing on splits? Are you focusing on honey? Do you have enough equipment to make sure that you can fulfill those goals? What are you going to do about deadouts? When are you going to go and check for deadouts? What are you going to do with the frames that are left over when you get a deadout? Planning is key because what happens if you don't plan it? You get to that point in the season and you think, oh, I don't really know what I'm going to do, and you kind of try and make it up on the spot. Not very efficient. Definitely not effective. Sit down, write a plan, and tell yourself what you're going to do throughout the season. It's great as well looking back at the end of the season and realizing that you didn't follow your plan at all, but it still looks very nice when it's written down on a piece of paper, and it makes you start to think about the processes that you need to think about. Now, I touched on this before in the first piece of advice, but it's to plan your equipment purchases to align with the sales. Beekeeping is one of those very strange hobbies where it seems there is always kind of like a sale that's going on, except at the really super busy times of year. So you very rarely see, within the UK at least, any sales between say March and September, and that's the time when the bee equipment is going to be in peak demand. So I've been caught out in that before. It's not a nice one when you get the invoice back and it's like 50% more or 100% more than how much you would have paid in the winter. But plan ahead, make sure you've got enough, and always add on a little bit of contingency. So I fall into this trap every single season. I wear my bee suits, I snag my bee suits, I get holes in my bee suits, and I say, right, I'm going fix that over winter. Winter is the time to fix your bee suits. And then I get to spring and I've forgotten to do it, and then I have the whole season with bees getting into the holes through the bee suits. I'm giving you the heads up now. It's January now. If you're a channel member, you're going to see this video really early on. Go and do some maintenance and inspection checks on all of your equipment. Do it on your pickup truck, do it on any machinery that you've got, do it on your bee suits, and try and get in there and do that preemptive maintenance work or that remedial rectification work while it's much cheaper to do And while the companies don't have a huge amount of work on. You'll find if you send your beekeeping suit off to someone to repair it in May or June, might take them 3 or 4 weeks. If you do it in winter, they're probably going to turn it around in a week or so. Now, the cold weather in the winter gives you a really unique opportunity to move things around within your apiary. If you're in the height of the beekeeping season, you've got the 3-mile or the 3-foot rule, which means that you can move your hive up to 3 feet in any direction and the bees will work out where it is. If you go anything over 3 feet, you need to go up to 3 miles. Although a couple of miles will generally work as well, and it makes it very, very difficult to move your colonies at the height of the season. If you get a cold snap over winter, you can just move the colonies any distance you want within that individual apiary. You don't need to take them away, you don't need to go over 3 miles, you don't need to wait 6 weeks. The bees are clustered up, they're rarely coming outside, and if they do, they're reorientating pretty much every time they come out because they haven't been out for such a long time. Use the opportunity if you want to, to reconfigure that apiary, And what I'm doing this year is I'm trying to get some bigger gaps in between my colonies to reduce that drift and to reduce any transmission of EFB. Seems like a sensible, logical thing to do. And if you've got enough space in your apiary, you can start to move those beehives apart, face them off in slightly different directions, move them onto different beehive stands, and just generally improve the quality of that apiary. Can't do it in April. You can do it in January though. So in terms of preparation, looking at your colonies, you need to make sure that you get your bees through the winter. Doesn't matter how many of frames and boxes you've had. If you neglect your bees at this point of the year, you are not going to have any bees when you get into spring. So make sure you're doing your regular checks. All I'm doing at this point of the year is I'm taking a look at the entrances. I'm seeing the bees flying when it's a nice warm day. I'm lifting them up, I'm hefting them, I'm making sure there's sufficient weight in that beehive, and even cracking the lid a couple of times as well, taking a look, seeing how the bees are getting on. I'm not pulling frames out yet because it's way too cold to be doing that, but I'm doing my regular checks, and I'm doing them at this point of the year pretty much every week. Failing that, every other week. Now, as you move out of January into February into March, you definitely need to increase the frequency of those inspections and get up to a weekly inspection by the middle of Feb, I'd say, at the latest for people in the UK. And just be aware that it's a kind of exponential curve in terms of the amount of stores that they're going to consume, because what happens is the days get longer, the queen and the colony realizes that, they send a signal to her to lay more eggs, you get more brood, which means that there's more heat that's required to keep that brood warm, which means that there's more energy required, more energy that's going to be exhausted by the colony. And then as you get more energy exhausted, you get more warmth, which means you get more brood. So it's kind of like this exponential curve. So in January, if you fed them well, very low risk of them starving. In February, again, if you fed them well, relatively low risk of them starving. In March, everything is up for grabs and it doesn't matter how well you fed them. If you've got a queen that's motoring away and you get a cold snap and there's lots of brood in there, they can starve within a couple of days. So make sure you err on the side of caution. If you think they're getting anywhere near too light for your liking, get some fondant on, lay it directly on the bars, and let the bees feed on that. Worst case scenario is you get through to March, you get through to April, they've not eaten the fondant, you take it off, and you've lost a couple of quid. Now the next one is going to seem like a shameless plug, and I hope it's not taken that way, but order your bees in advance. And I say it's not a shameless plug because we are pretty much sold out of nucs now. We start taking orders for nucs kind of in August, September the previous year, and we are always sold out by the end of February. And we get loads of requests coming to March and April, and people say, well, I didn't think that we could start beekeeping that early, so I didn't think I need to order my bees. If you've not got bees and you're interested in getting bees, get your orders in as soon as you possibly can, whether it's through us, whether it's through someone else. The big players will sell out, and then the small guys like me, we kind of follow relatively quickly after. So get your orders in quickly. Make sure you don't get to the point in the season where you want to buy bees and there's just no bees available. So the next piece of advice is something that I'm really, really bad at, so I shouldn't be giving people advice on this, but I know weaknesses, and it's an area that I do need to improve, and that is my hive inspection records. I've tried pretty much every single method, so I've had balancing bricks, I've had rag status discs, I've had laminated cards, I've tried every single app that you can imagine, and I've resorted to just writing on the hive with an oil-based pen. None of those methods are very good, but what I need to do is I need to think and I need to come up with a suitable efficient, easy method for capturing hive notes that's going to be effective and efficient in the field. It's amazing, whenever you do that in January or February, you think, I've got the best system, this spreadsheet's going to give me all the information that I need, and then it's taking you like half an hour to fill that in at every single colony, and it just becomes a real drain. So try and kind of like pull it back a little bit. What's the really important information that you need to gather from every single hive? And try and work out a method that's going to work for you So that when you come to doing your inspections, you can do them nice and easy. The next piece of advice I would give links back to your plan for the season. Are you going all out for honey? Are you making splits? But then what kind of intertwines within that is what is your strategy for swarming? As we've said previously, everyone knows I'm a one-trick pony. I like a preemptive Demaray. You can find the link to that on my channel. And what that is, is that is a vertical split that encourages the bees into big, strong colonies. And kind of temporarily tricks them into thinking that they've swarmed. It is a method of artificial swarming, and I always say you need to make sure that you do it preemptively and not reactively. So what's your strategy? Are you going to wait for the queens to produce queen cells? Are they going to produce swarm cells? And then you're going to say, right, I'm going to do some form of emergency split, some form of artificial swarm. Or are you going to do something preemptively to try and stop the bees swarming? Are you going to combine that with nucs, making up nucs, which becomes a very efficient use of resources within the apiary? Or are you going to do something completely different and just hope that the bees don't swarm? Again, write it down, have a plan, think about what you're going to do, and try and actually kind of enforce that throughout the season, as opposed to getting to the point where it's May and you're running around, you're like, ah, all of my bees are swarming and I don't know what my strategy is, because you'll tend to kind of make the quickest and easiest reaction, which is, I don't know what I'm going to do, I'm just going to make a split, and then you might lose your bees to swarming. The key to beekeeping, the art in beekeeping, is going into the winter, coming out of the winter, and getting into the next year with the same number of colonies. That maximizes your honey yield. That's the difficult bit. Making splits is easy. Anyone can do it. So next up is varroa. How are you going to treat your colonies for varroa? Are you going to do Apivar early in the spring? Are you going to use some sort of formic acid and taking the supers off, maybe a Max or a Formic Pro? Are you going to use Apivar early in the autumn, late in the summer? You need to get your timings in. And I remember the really Big decision I made one year was to actually plan this out a little bit and say, right, as opposed to just waiting as long as I possibly can to get as much honey as I possibly can, I have a cutoff date. So for me, it's towards the middle and end of August. I will say at that point, right, that is my cutoff, absolute latest date, 30th of August. I'm taking a cut off there. I'm taking my honey crop off, I'm putting my Apivar strips in, and then any honey that the bees collect after that, That is for the bees, and the bees can overwinter on it. Never goes into any supers. I condense them down to a brood box at that point. And some people say, well, I get most of my honey after that point. So you need to work out timings for you. But for me, that made a massive, massive difference to the health of my bees. It meant that when the bees were creating their winter bees late on in the season, and they start creating these around like September, October time, maybe into early November, but when they got to that point in the season, the varroa load was very, very What I did in previous years is I got to like the end of September, took all of my honey off, gave myself a big pat on the back and said, wow, I got loads of honey. The bees were knackered, the bees were battered because they were really infested with varroa. I put the Apivar strips in, and then as the bees were creating the winter bees, the mite load was very, very high. Resulted in increased winter losses and then really poor colonies coming out of the winter into the spring for the next season. So just by planning, timing, working out when I'm going to use my varroa treatments, resulted in much healthier colonies and a relatively stable yield because I had more strong colonies going into the next year, which gave me that increased yield. So there we go, not going to go into any more detail. I hope your bees are nice and prepared. If you've got any questions, go on to my website, ask a question, and I'll answer it in a live stream.