Laurence Edwards says beekeepers should stop inspecting hives in September after completing August preparations. Once you've harvested honey, condensed to one brood box, applied Apivar strips, and insulated the roof, further inspections break propolis seals and risk squashing the queen. He hasn't seen a single swarm in September across 100-150 colonies in five years.
It's the first week of September. In this video, I'm going to talk to you about late season colony management. So I absolutely love this time of year. April, May, June, July, August are the real difficult days for beekeepers. Lots of hard work. We've got through all the difficult stuff now, and what you have to do now is resist the temptation to do anything. So in terms of a summary, to get us to this point, what we've done, we've taken off every single box of honey, condensed the bees down into a single brood box, checked that the colony is queen right, done any requeening if needed, added Our Apivar strips in around the kind of early to mid-August, which is for us in North Wales, but you need to time that in with your honey harvest. We place a poly Ashforth feeder directly on top of the brood box, and then we strap the colonies up for winter, ratchet strapping them down to a pallet. Once you've got the colonies to that position, late season colony management becomes very, very easy for me. I do absolutely nothing. Literally do nothing. I don't even bother going into the colonies anymore. And it's not a case of I don't want to go in and see how they're getting on. But I feel that going in at this point of the year, you're doing way more damage than any good that you can do. You've checked that they're queen right, you've replaced any dodgy queens, you've given them their mite treatment, you've given them an initial feed to make sure that they've got sufficient stores to get them through. You've placed the polyash forth feeder into position, you've strapped everything down. And what the bees will be doing at this point is they'll be going out doing some last-minute foraging. They'll be rearing all of their winter bees maybe over the next 6 weeks or so. But the other big thing that they're doing at this point is they're propolising down the beehive Getting rid of any drafts, making it really nice and watertight and draft-proof and secure for winter. If you keep on going in at this point of the year, cracking it open, you're really damaging those seals, and those seals do take quite a while for the bees to put them together. You're also risking at this point of the year squishing your queen, and it is very, very easy to squish your queen at this point of the year because you've added in quite a lot of congestion into that colony. So if you've taken a colony of bees that's on, say, a national 14 by 12 brood box and then 6 supers, and you've taken away all those 6 supers and you said to the bees, right, compress yourself down into that space. Be amazed how well they can compress themselves down. But as soon as you start pulling frames out, that is when you're going to roll your queen. Do you know what rolling the queen is? It's when you pull the frame out, the queen rolls like that and you can squish and kill her. Really, really easy to do. And if you've checked that the colony is queen right, say the last week of August, you don't need to check it again. There's nothing you can do about a late season supersedure. If they choose to supersede kind of like last week of September, first week of October, there's nothing you can do. You can't go out and buy another queen. Okay, you could combine them with another colony, but I'm really not a fan of combining late season failed supersedures because the risk is that they kill the other queen that you're combining them with, and then you end up with 2 failures as opposed to one. So late season colony management, as long as you've done the following: taken off your honey, condensed them down as much as you're willing to condense them, checked for queen rightness, requeened if necessary, Added in your mite treatment, got your feeder into position. Even if you're not feeding them at this point, get your feeders into position, get that setup sorted. Added some insulation over the roof. Get your winter insulation in really nice and early because it can help with the late season buildup, getting the winter bees ready. Then September, all you need to do is just kick back and do nothing. I know the temptation's still there to go in there, do your weekly inspections and check them, but my personal view is that inspecting in September does more damage than it's worth. And you might be thinking, well, I've had a colony that swarmed in September, so I'm going to continue inspecting to make sure that they don't swarm. I think that's a little bit of a numbers game. We've still got around 100 colonies. I know we're trying to get the numbers down, but we're failing massively at that. Still got around 100 colonies, and we go into winter with maybe 100, 150 colonies. And I cannot remember the last time that I lost a swarm in September. And I know that because going into winter, they've got marked queens. So if I go into spring and I've not got a marked queen anymore, I know either the colony swarmed or they've superseded. I can't remember that happening. in the last 5 years. So I'm pretty confident with where I live, the bees aren't going to swarm in September. And I'd say that any ones that do, it is an outlier as opposed to the norm. So it's great late season colony management. You really don't have to do anything. Do the hard work back end of August, get that honey harvest off, get them treated, make sure they're queen right, get them set up, and go and do some of the things that you've failed to do throughout the season because you've just been so busy.
