Preparing Colonies for Winter

Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Today I'm going to show you how to prepare your apiary for winter. So we're at this apiary here today. It's a bit of a top secret location, this one, yet to be published, but we're here. It's the end of the season, middle of August. We've taken off all the honey supers, And we're going to be putting on our Apivar, which is the treatment of choice this year for mites. And then we're going to be getting them ready for winter, doing a few checks, and then we're going to be feeding them. I like to kind of come in in one hit on these apiaries. I don't want to be coming here, coming back numerous trips. I come in on one trip, take the honey, apply the miticide, put the feeders on, and close them back up.

And I give them—

you'll see in this video, we give them a huge amount of syrup, and they tend to take all of that down this time of year, and they turn a lot of it into brood. And then I'll come back later on in the year, kind of early September, and I'll give them their winter syrup. We always apply 2:1 syrup, but they kind of turn that first round of 2:1 syrup into new bees, which is what I want them to do. I want to absolutely fill that brood box from end to end. Lots of bees equals really, really healthy winter bees. So that's the process. We'll get inside and I'll show you how I do it. Right, so I'm going to show you now the full process of getting the hives Ready for winter. So I've chosen a hive that's particularly small because it's going to make this video easier for me. So they've not drawn out the foundation within these supers. It was a bit of a dwindling colony, this one, so I've had to requeen it. But that's an important step to include within this video, so I've selected it for that specific reason, is that there was an issue with the queen. Wasn't happy with the pattern. All of these other colonies here, they're full up with honey. This one, they've barely made it out of the brood box. So I'm not happy with the queen. So I've gone in, I've squished the queen, and I've added a new queen. So in the brood box, I've got my new queen. I can take the roof off. Now, normally this would be full of honey, so you would have put your clearer boards in. Or if you want to use a blower, you can use a blower. The blower is really, really good for something like this where they've not actually drawn it out. I know blowers get a bit of a bad rap, but I don't find they're too bad.

So we'll do this one with the blower. That's it, clear. Clear.

And that's it. I mean, you can see all those bees there. They're coming straight back to the hive. It's a really non-intrusive way of getting the bees out of those supers. It works really, really well on kind of capped honey as well, especially if you've got castellations in, but especially if you just want to clear some bees out of an empty box like that. The blower works really well, so I would recommend it. But however you want to clear your honey supers, it's up to you. I mean, on the rest of these, we would have gone through and put clearer boards in. That's a really, really good way of doing it. And then use the blower just to kind of finish them off if there's any straggler bees. So assume that's full of honey. We take our honey away and we go and put that in the car, get it out of the way. You don't want to start any robbing. So once you've got your supers out of the way, what we do is we remove the queen excluder, shake that off, and then I like to get in there and do an inspection. Like I say, I mean, we requeened this one about a week ago because we knew there was an issue, but But this is the time of year where I'd always suggest getting into your colonies, seeing what's going on. You need to make sure that there's no issue before you do your Apivar, before you do your feeding. Like, what's the point in doing all of the kind of stuff to get them through the winter if there's a really poor performing queen in there? This is the time to requeen. So get in there, requeen if you need to, and then jump to these steps.

Oh, good girl.

So as you can see, they've not even filled this box. Second frame in though, it's got some stores in it. And that queen's coming to lay now, so there's lots of eggs in here, which is really, really good. So I'm confident now that we can do the manipulations to get these bees through winter. Right, so we've taken off all of the honey supers. We're left with just a naked brood box full of bees. The next thing you want to do is your mite treatment. So this year we're using Apivar, as we've shown on a previous video, and this box here is over 9 frames of bees and it's about 7 frames of brood, so I'm going to use 2 strips of Apivar.

And we just place those down.

Covered this in a separate video, but we place them down in between frames 3 and 4 and in between frames 6 and 7, evenly spaced, not more than 2 frames close to each other. And that's going to give you a really, really long, prolonged knockdown of mites. That needs to stay in for 6 to 8 weeks, and that's going to really, really lower the amount of mites within your hive. So then we take a Swenty or whatever Ashforth feeder, Big feeders. I love these feeders. Added the rim on the bottom. The Abello one comes with the rim. I think the Maisemore one comes with the rim. They all come with the rim actually, except Swenty. It seems to be the ones that I get. Um, but yeah, nice big feeder. That's what you want. So you put your feeder on, make sure the insert's in, and then we're going to fill this one up with syrup. So this is homemade 2:1 syrup. I've done it on another video. What you want this time of year is really, really thick syrup and lots of it. So either buy it, apiinvert, or make up your own. And then you want to fill it up. So I've gone for about 10 litres in there, I reckon. The reason that you want so much syrup in there is that you've just put a treatment on where you don't actually need to open that hive up again for 6 weeks. So why add 1 or 2 litres of syrup? Because then you're going to have to come back in probably 2 days and put more syrup in. With a big feeder like that, you can lock these up, fill up the whole apiary, and I literally don't have to come back here now for 6 weeks. The next time I need to come back to this apiary is to come and take the Apiinvert strips out. I'll probably come back in 4 weeks, just check if they need a feed. But the weather's really good at the moment, so they can go out, they can forage as well. There's plenty of food for them still to come. Himalayan balsam and ivy. That syrup there is going to get that colony booming. It's going to get it growing and it's going to get it really, really strong for winter.

So that's it.

That's how I set up my colonies for winter. I take all the honey off, I take the queen excluder off, I put my ApiVar strips in, or whatever treatment you're going to use. I put the feeder on, make sure it's got a rim around it, make sure the plastic insert's in, and I Fill it up pretty much with 2:1 or invert syrup, and then I can just leave these, leave these guys to it. 6 weeks later, I'm going to come back, I'm going to remove those strips, and I'll top up the feeders as necessary. My final top-up of the year, I like to use an invert syrup, so I won't use a homemade syrup for the last feed of the year just because I don't want any mould growing. And I know I can add thymol to it as well to stop that. I just find they really do like the last feed to be kind of like an happy invert. So I'll feed them up with that at the end. Obviously, I'll check the weight to see how they're getting on. If they don't need feeding, I won't feed them. But I find this is a really, really good method to get these guys through the year. So it is completely dependent on when you start this process as to where you are within the country. If the guys in the south did this at the same time as me, they would have left it too late, I think. Like, it's a completely different management style really where you are throughout the UK and obviously throughout the world as well. But where we are in North Wales, I find early August, first week of August, this is when you want to be getting in there. Unless you're on a kind of a heather moorland or somewhere where there is copious amounts of Himalayan balsam, there's not that much coming in kind of from the first week of August onwards. Even the last week of July, you just need to kind of see and check your bees and check what the conditions are like and make that judgment call. But sooner is definitely better. Like, August is the worst possible month for varroa. If you don't get in there and do that treatment in August, then you're really, really going to struggle throughout the winter months. And those issues don't really kind of start to show themselves until probably early next year because you're not going to be going into these colonies that much and looking at them anymore. So it's all about kind of preemptive actions and taking action early. Like I say, varroa is terrible in August. They start off strong and they peak. They really, really start decimating colonies this time of year. So make sure you get your treatments on nice and early. You don't want to kind of gamble the life of your colony on half a super of honey. It's just not worth it. You're much better off taking off what you've got, putting the feeders on, putting the treatments on, getting through to next year with really, really healthy bees.

And that's it.

That's how we get our colonies ready for winter. We combine a lot of those activities.

So we remove our supers, take the honey off to be processed, we put our treatment on. So whether you're using kind of like a Max or an Apivar or a thymol or doing some oxalic blasts, We do that as soon as we take the honey supers off and then we feed. And those 3 things kind of all in conjunction with each other is the first step in getting the bees ready for winter.

So we'll cover it in a separate video.

But what we do at a later point in the year, so this video's run about like the first week in August. And like I said previously, it's completely dependent on when your honey flows finish. But when your honey flows finish, take all your honey supers off. Add the treatment of choice, add the feeders using like a 2:1 syrup, but a 1:1 syrup will work well at this time of the year, particularly if you're in the south. But we don't get too kind of worried, we don't worry too much about the strength of the syrup as long as it's above 1:1. And then we leave the bees and we leave them for kind of 3 or 4 weeks. We maybe go down and top up, just give them a bit of a heft and feel what the weight's like. And if the feed is empty, we'll give them a little bit more feed if they need it. But it's quite low intervention for them. the next 6 weeks. And then after 6 weeks, we go in and we take out those Apivar strips. Like I said, you definitely don't want to leave them in over the season, over the dormant season. And then we'll top up the bees with some invert syrup. So definitely invert syrup, 2 to 1, making sure that it doesn't go mouldy. And the bees will really readily take that down. And then we judge how much to give them at that point. So we kind of weigh the hives and we give them enough to get them up to weight. So at this time of the year, we're just kind of dumping a load of syrup. It doesn't matter too much how much you put in as long as you're putting in enough. So kind of, we just fill 'em up pretty much 10 to 12 litres and they always take all of that down and either use it for brood rearing or they store some of it. And then later on in the season, so kind of first, second week of September, we go down with the invert and then we weigh each hive and we measure them up and then we put the invert in to get them up to the target weight. At that point, we remove the plastic inserts from the feeders as well. And then we put a load of straw inside the feeders. That was a really good tip given to me by someone, and what that does is it enables the bees to get every last drop of that syrup, and they move up more readily into it on, like, on a nice warm day and clear it all down, bring it into the brood box. I mean, this is the idea though for getting colonies through the winter. You want strong, healthy bees. They need to have a queen, they need to be laying eggs. So you need to have seen that really before going into winter. You need to know that they're queen right and healthy. You want a nice laying pattern. That's really, really important. If there's any issues with the queen, be it kind of not mated correctly, drone-laying queen, poor temperament, poor disease, this is your chance to requeen. It's really, really easy to get queens at this time of year and get really good quality queens as well. Don't leave that job until the spring when it's really difficult to get good quality queens, and you probably end up waiting until kind of like May or June to get a good quality queen. If you're not too keen on importing them, and then you're in a bit of trouble getting that colony built up. The other things to look out for is you need to get the hive up to the target weight. And if you keep all of your hives on the same platform, so we use 14 by 12, it's really easy just to weigh them and see how much stores is in there. So you need to get them up to the target weight. But like I said, you want healthy bees, get them up to the target weight. You want a good Queen right colony, and you want the varroa level to be as low as you can possibly get it. And that should get your colony through the winter. Now, I mean, losses are inevitable. You'll always get winter losses. We run about 10% average for winter losses, slightly less for nucs for some reason. Do a little bit better on nucs. That runs between kind of 5 and 8%. But yeah, you will get losses, and there will be issues with queens and with colonies that you would have missed. And there will be diseases, and there will be starvation, and there will be isolation starved. starvation. There's loads of reasons why colonies fail over the winter. It's just a matter of fact that they do. What you need to do at this time of the year though is make preemptive nucs. Do it a little bit earlier maybe to backfill any losses that you have. So a good rule of thumb they say is to make 30% nucs for the number of colonies you've got. So if you've got 10 colonies, make up 3 nucs and overwinter your 3 nucs, and then you should be able to maintain 10 going into the next season, taking into account any losses. And if you've got 1 or 2 or 3 nucs surplus, Then you can sell them in the spring. They're in high demand in the spring. Don't worry, they will not last long. If you advertise them on Facebook or anywhere, someone will kind of snap your arm off for an early season overwintered nuc.

So that's it for the video.

Good luck everyone in getting your colonies prepared for the winter. It's always a relief for me once I get them prepared and I can see them going into winter, and then it always gets a little bit nervous kind of getting into February to see whether they've made it through. Check out our other videos though on overwintering colonies. It's a bit of an art getting the feed right, and you can definitely overfeed, so you just need to judge it and kind of— weighing scales is really, really good for getting the colonies through and getting them at the right weight. So I hope you've enjoyed this video. Please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time.

Bye.