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.

And Now the Queen Slows Down her Pace

Yesterday was the summer solstice (also sometimes referred to as the change of days) in the northern hemisphere.  I don't have any pictures to post about this - just wanted to note that beginning with the summer solstice, the queen in the bee hive slows down her laying.  She continues to slow until the winter solstice when she begins to build back up for spring.

Ross Conrad gave a talk at Young Harris a couple of years ago in which he said that splitting your hives after the solstice would be a good varroa control.  The split causes one half of the split to be without a queen until they can make their own, so the varroa mite foundress (the great mother mite) has nowhere to lay her eggs until egg laying begins again with the new queen.  This interrupts the varroa cycle and helps your bee hive rid itself of mites.

Apparently despite the slow down of the queen in a hive that is chugging along toward winter, the queen in a new split after the solstice acts like a spring queen and works hard to build up quickly, knowing that winter is just around the corner.

Christmas, the Winter Solstice, and The Bees

In Mississippi where I grew up we never had a white Christmas. In Atlanta, if it snows, generally it snows in February or maybe late January and once it snowed and closed the city down for a week in March (1993?). So in my life, I've never had a "white Christmas."

But yesterday on Christmas Day in Rabun Gap, Georgia, it snowed from morning to night and we had my very first white Christmas. For those of you used to this kind of thing, that probably is insignificant but I loved it. We had on the top of my mountain about six inches or so of snow by the time it stopped around 9 PM.



While the snow doesn't have much meaning for the bees, the winter solstice (December 21st) does. That day is the shortest day of the year and after December 21st, which marks the beginning of winter, the days gradually get longer and longer until we reach June 21st, the first day of summer.



In the dark interior of the hive, unable to see that the light lasts a bit longer each day, the queen bee senses that the solstice has come. That is one of the first signs to her that it is time to take up one of the survival tasks of the hive: to begin to grow itself into a larger group of bees. Some time after the solstice, maybe the next day, maybe several weeks later, the queen will lay a small patch of brood.

The hive needs enough food to make it through the winter and if they begin raising brood, they have to keep the cluster around the brood warmer than they may have kept it in the winter cold. The brood needs a temperature around 91 degrees to survive, while the cluster only needs to be kept around 70 degrees to survive. This taxes the hive resources.

So the queen's instinct to start laying brood has to do with the lengthening of the days as well as the amount of honey and pollen stored in the hive.

So while I am looking at snow on the picnic table in the first white Christmas day of my life, the queen is evaluating her need to build up the hive and is beginning to sense a need to lay brood.



As the snow slowed, here is how the hillside looked from my deck, gazing down the mountain.



Hope all of my bee friends and all of you who visit this blog had a happy holiday!