Winter Storms Have Arrived

Winter storms are here and we have just started our second below freezing cold spell for the year.  If hives aren't setup with food near the cluster these long cold spells can quickly starve them.  The tricky part about overwintering in the Puget Sound area is we bounce around during winter from warm to cold weeks.  This means they are burning more energy looking for forage on warm days and they are also breaking up the cluster.  Studies have shown bees do better when they have a consistent cold that keeps them inside most of the winter with an occasional nice day to do cleansing flights.  On the plus side these long cold spells are also good for finishing off other pests like the yellow jackets that don't have a food reserve to keep them going.

Snow on the Aster stems.

A good roof should keep the hive body dry.  Another perk to the top bar hive is that we would need about 4 feet of snow before it would be high enough to start blocking the entrances.

Winter blooming Camellia provides pollen.

False holly (Osmanthus heterophyllus) is a good mid November bloomer.

With a few warm days we've seen some Dandelions come back into bloom.

This Fennel plant is putting out blooms a bit late in the season.

Hive checks (11/8/2014)
Rebel Daughter
The brood diseases I saw last inspection have killed them.  I split up the resources between the Roma and Ballard Daughter hive.  This hive and queen line had struggled every year just to survive.

Every year I find a few overwintering yellow jacket queens.  Usually they are under the hive roofs in living hives.  In spring they will wake up and start new colonies assuming nothing squishes or eats them.  

If you see brood like this in your dead-out, your hive was sick.

Ballard Daughter
I checked a few frames in the cluster and they still have a good amount of brood coming and also saw larvae.  There are a good number of bees in this hive, and I was surprised to see this conservative hive still raising brood.

Brood in November.

Roma
They are still holding on, an I didn't look much past the last frame they were clustered on.  Moved the best honey frames from the Rebel Daughter hive next to the cluster.

Solis
They looked like they were doing good and have gotten ahead of the brood diseases.  They appear to have a good setup for winter and the hive is now full of comb they inherited from the Luna hive.  Now the question is whether they have enough bees to keep the cluster warm during storms.

An Assassin bug hiding under the cover.  I've been seeing these around everywhere this year.

Luna
I was surprised to see them already gone.  I knew they were sick, but they had a lot of bees and I was thinking they would make it a little later into winter.

Quickdraw
They didn't make it and the hive was getting robbed.  Brood disease took them out quickly.

Plum Creek
They weren't able to recover form the brood disease either and were gone.  The queen was oddly still alive, but she was alone minus a few robbers and yellow jackets.  I stuck her in a cage and she's on my desk at the moment.  There isn't anything I can do with her unless I stumble across queenless hive in the next day or so which is not likely to happen since I don't plan to inspect anyone else right now.

Dyno
They appear to have gotten ahead of the brood disease and had a good number of bees.  Didn't inspect further than the last frames and they were robbing out the other hives.  The hive is now full of the excess honey frames from both Plum Creek and Quickdraw.

Hive checks (11/27/2014)
Roma
Saw robbing activity between the Ballard daughter and Roma hives, but didn't inspect with the weather changing.  I suspect the Roma hive either died during the last cold spell or is too weak to stop robbing.

Back to the bees,

- Jeff

Mild Fall Confuses a Few Plants

Fall has been pretty mellow this season in the lowlands around Seattle.  There hasn't been a good freeze yet and some early spring plants have started blooming early as a result.  Being in the city there are also lots of non-natives around the neighborhoods that are winter bloomers that could provide forage if the bees happen to be out flying.  The temperature has been hovering around 40F during the day and the sun is usually hidden behind low clouds and fog keeping the bees inside.

Pollen from a Winter Camellia bloom.

Winter Camellia is a good pollen source.

It hasn't been warm enough to do much of an inspection in awhile but I would imagine that all the hives are done raising brood for the next few weeks.  I've heard that after winter solstice they will slowly pick up again, but I haven't had an opportunity to confirm if that is the case in our climate yet.  I haven't seen much flying lately but I suspect they aren't too tightly clustered due to the mild winter weather.  I will likely need to keep feeding dry sugar in all the nucs until spring so the don't starve.  I'm not too surprised though as we usually have fairly mild winters here and the temps really only drop when the occasional storm system passes through.  

Schizostylis coccinea (fall - early winter bloomer)

Bergenia cordifolia (often will bloom both spring and fall)

A few Rhododendron blooms are out (a warm fall may confuse them into blooming before winter).  Some buds may stay dormant until spring, but the ones that have bloomed won't re-bud.

Winter Jasmine (Jasminum nudiflorum)

Pink Princess Escallonia (usually a spring bloomer)

Snowstorm bacopa

Centranthus ruber (another confused spring bloomer)

Hive checks (12/1/2012)

It got up to about 50F today so did a quick check on the excess sugar supplies in several hives and found that all except the Rebel hive had cleaned up the reserves I left for them.  I added more sugar to Plum Creek, Geeks, Architects, Gluttons, Icon Daughter Nuc and Librarian Daughter Nuc.  All hives except the Librarian Daughter Nuc had good activity and I suspect the cluster in this nuc is just too small to break at 50F.

Hive checks (12/9/2012)

Checked the Surf and Sand hives today to give them sugar.  It was 40F and no one was flying but a few came back to see what I was doing at the back of the Surf hive.  I was also glad to see the moisture issue in the Surf hive was gone and the back of the hive was nice and dry.  The Sand hive got sugar as well even though they still had a little left.  No one came to greet me, but they have a lot of comb in that hive and I was much further away from the cluster.

Here is an old pic of the Geek queen in 2011 (upper middle of picture).  I don't recall if she had stopped moving here but it looks like she has 11 attendants around her.  A quality queen will have a decent number of attendants surround her whenever she stops.

Back to the bees.

- Jeff

A Ball of Bees

With temperatures just a hair above freezing at night and a bit warmer during the day you would think that the bees would be in cluster by now.  Perhaps their exoskeletons are a bit thicker here than the average southern climate bee because they seem to think anything above 40F is perfectly acceptable forage weather... really!  Perhaps it's some paternal instinct for their well being that makes me think that they shouldn't be out flying, as I watch the entrance activity in my down coat and gloves.

Regardless of my opinion, it seems that Mother Nature is in agreement with them and the plants are providing both pollen and propolis.  There is however one difference from summer foraging and that is they greatly shorten the window of foraging time to the best daylight house of the day from 10-2PM.

Entrance traffic jam.

If a picture is worth a 1000 words well here are a couple video clips to give you a better picture of how busy they still are.  These were taken around 11AM on 11/26/2012 and the temp was reading 42F.

Clip 1
http://youtu.be/1jP2fsmxVm8

Clip 2 - A little closer.
http://youtu.be/Ay3tekoC7EQ

As you can see there is some light yellow and whitish pollen coming in.  So where are they finding all this pollen?  Here are are a few places I found on a walk around the neighborhood:

Choisya (Mock Orange) sometimes can get confused by the weather and bloom in late fall.

The rain also has ivy putting out a secondary bloom.  There is a lot less competition on the blooms now with the lower temps shutting down the wasps (finally).

Japanese Aralia has a very similar flower to ivy, and this is an evergreen bush with large leaves.  The buds below haven't opened yet but the ones in the background have.

Penstemon is a hardy flower that blooms into late fall.  The bell shape of the bloom protects the pollen inside from getting wet.

Some varieties of Hebe also bloom in winter.

A few sunny spots still have fennel blooming.

 Winter Camellia blooms opening and have lots of pollen up for grabs.

 

Wow with all those flowers you might think Seattle was a topical oasis, but it is not and you just have to look at all the bare trees to know that it is indeed winter.  Perhaps the plants here are just thick skinned not too unlike the bees.

Back to the bees.

- Jeff