Heat from Inside Can/not Predict Live Bees in Winter

At GBA this past weekend, Jim Tew suggested that if you wanted to have a good time in the winter, go buy yourself a cheap stethoscope and have yourself a party listening to the sides of your beehives. It probably isn't much of a party if you don't hear anything, but if you do, that could be fun.

We had snow on January 23. Not much of a snow, but it did actually fall white out of the sky and accumulated barely on our yards before it melted by midday or early afternoon. In the morning I looked out of my window and noticed that snow was melting on top of my hives.

OK, I thought, if a hive has melted snow on the top, the bees are generating enough heat to melt it...that would be an indication that the hive is alive. If the snow is totally unmelted, the hive must be dead. Sounds reasonable, right?

So here's the tour:

Nuc number one: made from the tall hive to the left in late July:

Nice hot little melted circle and I have the warm confident feeling that this hive is alive.

Nuc Number two: also made from the tall hive to the left in late July:

This nuc is in a deep with one medium super above it. The snow is unmoved by bee heat, so I assume this nuc is dead. After all, it seemed light and had not taken the honey I had fed them.

Hive Three: Survivor swarm from my neighborhood. This is its second winter. These bees refused to use the entrance once I put a Billy Davis robber screen on and found their way out through a crack in a board on the side.

Again the snow and ice have melted - in a funny slanted pattern, but melted, nonetheless. So I assumed these bees were alive.

Next hive: A Jarrett Apiaries package that I did not harvest from because I wanted them to have enough food to go through winter

Snow covered with no signs of melting. These bees must be dead.

This is a hive that was in a nuc through last winter that I kept in a nuc most of bee season. In July I moved it into a normal hive to overwinter. See the round pattern of melted ice and snow? These bees are going to make it through their second winter.

And finally my "mother" hive who has birthed most of these babies. She began as a split from a survivor hive that I got from Bill Owens. This hive is a swarm from the Bill Owens hive in Tom Phillips' yard. And look at the powerful circle of heat it has generated. This is this hive's third winter.

So, as Paul Harvey used to say, here is the "Rest of the Story." That was the title of his radio show.

So all the hives that I thought were alive are indeed alive. Following Walt Wright's checkerboarding plan, I have been into the top of all of the hives in the last two weeks and attempted checkerboarding. I say attempted because I don't have lots of drawn comb and because some of the honey domes in my hives included honey joined to honey in the next frame so lifting one of those frames would cause a mess of dripping honey in the hive and I didn't want that. So in the eight frames, I moved at least three in each hive to an upper box and moved in drawn comb.

However, all the hives I thought were dead were not. The nuc in the deep is so concentrated in the deep and have not used the box above it at all. I had an inner cover on it with a surround nuc box and an interior Boardman feeder of honey in the top box with the top cover on that. I assume that the heat generated by the hive was dissipated by the time it made its way through the empty second box and the inner cover.

The hive totally covered with snow was indeed dead. I opened it and it was full of honey that had not been slimed by the SHB. This means they went into winter with honey, but had died for another reason. The bottom of the hive was full of dead bees. I did not see deformed wing, but I'm sure the hive died by something vectored by the varroa mite. I did not use the honey left in the hive to feed any other hives because I did not want to transmit disease and all of the other hives had plenty of honey.

The one hive short on supplies (or at least I thought so because they had no honey in the second box) was the deep nuc covered with snow. I filled a feeder jar with honey and put it in the surround nuc box and by the next day the bees had moved all of the honey into the nuc box below.

So while looking at melted snow does tell part of the story, it doesn't necessarily tell the whole story.

In Atlanta, it's Snow-Jam but in the Bee Hive, the Queen is Preparing for Spring

In Atlanta on Tuesday, we probably had the traffic jam of all time; the one that will go down in the record books.  People were stuck in their cars on the iced over Interstate for upwards of sixteen hours.  They were overnight in their cars with no bathroom, no water, no food.  This was typically because far down the road ahead of them, an eighteen wheeler had slid down an exit ramp and ended up sideways on the highway.  The rescue vehicles couldn't get to them or help them so everyone sat.  This was true all around the Atlanta Interstates and main thoroughfares.

This was certainly a sign that in Atlanta in January, we are in the grip of winter.

But in the bee hive, on the winter solstice, the queen got the urge to begin her spring build-up.  Her instincts tell her on that day that times have changed and the days will start getting longer.  In response, the queen prepares for the hive's spring population and in the dead cold, she begins to lay.  Not a lot of eggs at first - just a few, but she does start.

She has to create, for example, drones to carry her genetic material into a drone congregation area to mate with other queens.  Dean Stiglitz in his video on how mating occurs in the bee (hilarious - you should watch it for its short five minutes) points out that the drone is actually a flying sperm and only represents the queen's genetics.  He then mates with another queen so in essence two queens are mating with the drone as his queen's emissary!



A drone takes 24 days to mature so if there are to be drones ready to fly at the end of March, then she has to lay his egg around the end of February.  And why do the drones need to be available early in the season?  Because the mission of the strong hive is to split itself into two in a reproductive act of splitting the organism that is the hive.

Also if the reproductive drive of the hive as a whole is to split with one half of the hive flying away to form a new organism (hive), then there must be plenty of workers to accomplish this.  Workers take 21 days to emerge and there must be workers around to care for the eggs that are laid to make all of the brood, both workers and drones.

Thinking like this, it is obvious that the queen MUST start laying again increasingly at the winter solstice.

So in the last two days, while traffic was frozen in Atlanta and the hive was covered with ice and snow, the bees inside were awake and working.  It's true that if the air outside is very, very cold, the brood must be protected, so the queen does not lay more eggs than she has workers to keep the brood warm.

Here's what my hive looked like in my backyard:

Last year I got a lot of criticism from a forum in Great Britain because I had four boxes on an overwintered hive.  Let me remind you that I keep my bees in 8 frame medium hives, so three boxes is the equivalent of a deep and a medium.  Also the fourth box was where they stored the bee tea I gave them above the inner cover, so the top box is empty - just a surround for the rapid feeder.

And since it doesn't happen often, here's a photo of my front yard in the Atlanta snow yesterday:

 This afternoon most of the street had melted away, but my yard front and back is still covered with snow.  The temperatures tomorrow should be high enough to melt that away as well.

But I canceled a planned trip to Philadelphia to visit my daughter because I had no confidence that I could get a taxi to the MARTA station with the roads like this.

Snow and Bees

On Sunday night Atlanta looked more like Minnesota. The snow fell steadily all night. The beehives on my deck are unoccupied, but look at them in the snow!

Hannah, my dog, wanted to check them out around 9:30 PM.



I visited Blue Heron on Sunday morning and put a heavy log on top of each of the three hives there to point out to the "marauder" who probably, I hate to say it, was human, that these tops aren't to be removed. I even put a log on Julia's hive that has no bees in it to emphasize my point.



The first thing Hannah did in the snow was to dig up her favorite toy from under the layers of ice and snow. Neither Henry (the black pom) nor Hannah really understood what to do with this mess.



Here's how the hives looked when the snow stopped.



Today (Tuesday) we are iced over. The snow is hard ice and the street in front of my house has a 2 inch layer of ice before you reach the pavement. Atlanta is relatively paralyzed. The buses aren't even running today.

So what's happening in the beehive when there are bees in the hive during a harsh winter?  They are trying to maintain homeostasis.....see next post.

Bee Worried

Over the weekend, it really snowed in Atlanta and was quite cold until midday on Saturday. Last night the temperatures were in the low 20's and it barely rose to freezing today. We are having one of the coldest winters that I can remember since I moved here in 1979. Although apparently my memory is skewed, because as an Atlanta Journal Constitution blogger points out, actually our winters are getting much warmer every year.

However, this one appears to me to be expanding in its breadth. Last year in February, it felt like spring. But not this year.

I came home from the Georgia Beekeepers "spring" meeting in the snow in Moultrie, GA, almost as far south as Florida, to find my beehives had snow on the landings.

I am worried about the bees. This late cold weather can result in dead hives - not from the cold but from starvation. If the cluster is not where the food is when the cold strikes, the bees will starve.

I am also worried because when we do have a bee-flying day (above 50 degrees), I work too late to see if mine are alive and flying. Cindy Bee suggested that I dust the landings with flour on a day forecast to be warm enough for flying. Then even if I don't see the bees, I'll see their little footprints to know if a hive were up and flying.

Of course, Bermuda, the hive pictured above that I am most worried about, uses a top entrance that they created from a bad shim and I won't see their little bee-prints.

The weather forecast looks as though it will be sunny, bee-flying weather on Friday and Saturday. I'll be on the lookout for flying bees.

Note: The record high for this date in Atlanta was 78 in 1995, the record low was 11 in 1958. Today the low was 21 and the high was 30 - so you can see why I am reacting!

My bee hives in the snow last Friday ago

If we get snow in Atlanta, it rarely sticks. The major snows here in the 30 years I've lived here are mostly in March and late February....a freakish cold snap as spring is beginning.

Out of character for Atlanta, we had a major snow last Friday. It wasn't deep but it did have a layer of ice under it - which in Atlanta as humid as we are - stops traffic.

Here's what my hives looked like. My friend Diana told me that she knew her hives were alive through the snow because a heated area melted on the tops of her hives (due to the heat generated by the bees inside). My hives didn't accumulate that much snow and what was there didn't melt in any unique or significant way. (Can you tell I'm jealous of Diana's photo opp - and BTW, she didn't take a picture of it!)



Obviously there's no flying from these hives. The temperature remained in the teens and 20s all week, so I worried about my bees. It's around this time of year that the bees sometimes get fooled by Mother Nature. They have experienced some warmer days; the red maple is actually already blooming; and they start thinking spring is here when it isn't. So hives that have made it through the winter until now may suddenly be dead of starvation.



I'm too scared to put my ear to the side of the hive. I wish I were brave enough but I don't want to find out that a hive has died.

Feeding Blue Heron in the Cold Weather

Yesterday we had significant snow in Atlanta, but since it's March by this afternoon, all of it had melted away. Around 2 PM I went to Blue Heron to add food to the hives. There was still a tiny bit of snow as you can see in the first picture.



When I arrived at Blue Heron, my car said the temperature was 42 degrees. The jars of sugar syrup had been in my car for the last couple of days and in the cold, unscrewing the top was quite a challenge.

If I had been at home, I would have held the lid under a hot stream of water until I could easily unscrew it. However, no such condition was possible here so I used my Swiss Army knife to loosen the lid. I then substituted a solid lid with tiny punched holes in it.


There were a few bees actually flying around the hives, but unprotected by veil and gloves, I put these two Boardman feeders on our hives. We have added food to these hives now about every two days.

Don't you love Julia's Apis Mellifera?


In case you didn't believe the bees were out and about, I took a picture of one who landed on the grass right in front of the hive!

A Miserable Day for Bees

It's March in Atlanta and guess what! We have snow. It snowed all day long. This picture was snapped around 1 PM. The snow fell thick and beautifully all day. I imagine the bees wished for sun and temps over 60, but instead, in Atlanta's inimitable spring way, the temps were a little above freezing all day long. Tonight it will drop into the 20s. I hope for the best for the bees.

If you're wondering about Bermuda back in the corner with five (5???) boxes, there is an explanation. You'll notice the hive is in all medium boxes. Wintering in mediums requires three full boxes - sometimes four. This hive went into winter with the bottom three boxes full of bees and honey. The fourth box was skimpily filled but did have honey that I never harvested. Above the fourth box is a ziploc baggie so the last box is simply empty, surrounding the baggie.

Rare Day - Snow on my Beehives

It snowed off and on all day today - an unusual winter occurrence in Atlanta. The bees, wise as they are, apparently remained indoors, as well they should. Temperatures are supposed to be in the 20s tonight, so I don't expect to see bees before next week when it warms up.

I spent today at the Metro Atlanta Beekeepers Short Course, held in spite of the inclement weather. I had a small role on the agenda and did the "goody bags" which we gave to the participants. We had a fantastic turnout and I hope will end up with inspired new beekeepers as well as new members of our Metro Atlanta Beekeepers Club.