Bundling Up the Bees!

After a successful bee season that produced honey harvests in May, June, and August, Tyler Arboretum’s hardworking bees are all settled in for the winter.

Around early September, Tyler’s four colonies started producing “winter bees,” which are physiologically different from the spring and summer bees that collect nectar and produce honey. The spring and summer bees live only about six weeks. But the winter bees store food reserves in their abdomens that enable them to live up to six months. As they cluster around the queen, which stops laying eggs in late fall, they vibrate their wing muscles to keep warm and replenish their energy reserves with honey that the spring and summer bees have stored.

Filling Up and Packing Down

Tyler’s beekeepers have worked throughout the season to ensure that the colonies have enough honey resources by harvesting conservatively and leaving some amount of honey in the hives at all times.

After the last honey harvest in August, the Tyler bees filled up on nectar and pollen from the fall goldenrod, asters, and other meadow wildflowers, as well as flowering herbs in the Fragrant Garden.

In late September, the beekeepers started preparing the colonies for winter by removing empty hive boxes and frames where the bees hadn’t stored any honey or pollen. Reconfiguring or “packing down” the hives gives bees less space to defend from pests, such as small hive beetles and wax moths. The extra frames were cleaned and stored so they’ll be ready to use again in the spring. Mouse guards were installed at the entrances to bar any rodent intruders.

The remaining hive boxes were then bundled up with an extra layer of insulation, mimicking a tree cavity similar to the ones that feral honey bee colonies overwinter in. The insulation also helps create an internal water source as the heat from the winter cluster condenses on the side walls. The bees use this condensation to liquify their stored honey before consuming it.

Managing Mites

October’s tasks also included completing the season’s last Varroa destructor mite monitoring and treatments. The Varroa mite is an invasive pest that was introduced to the U.S. in the late 1980s, and mite control is the biggest challenge in modern beekeeping. Mites feed on bee larvae and pupae, weakening the developing bees and transmitting viruses that compromise adult bees. A mite infestation can easily overwhelm and kill even the strongest and healthiest-looking colonies. Mite management involves monthly monitoring and applying organic treatments to knock down mite populations to low levels.

Quick Winter Peeks

Throughout the winter, Tyler’s beekeepers will keep an eye on the colonies, occasionally lifting the lids to check that the bees aren’t going through their honey stores too quickly and adding supplemental feed at the top of the hives, if necessary. In late winter, around February, the queens will resume laying eggs, producing the new bees that will be ready to fly when spring’s first blooms appear.

Winter Bees

— Joyce Sidman

We are an ancient tribe,
a hardy scrum.
Born with eyelash legs
and tinsel wings,
we are nothing on our own.
Together, we are One.
We scaled a million blooms
to reap the summer’s glow.
Now, in the merciless cold
we share each morsel of heat,
each honeyed crumb.
We cram to a sizzling ball
to warm our queen, our heart, our home.
Alone, we would falter and drop,
a dot on the canvas of snow.
Together, we boil, we teem, we hum.
Deep in the winter hive,
we burn like a golden sun.

 

Credit: Sidman, Joyce, and Rick Allen. Winter Bees & Other Poems of the Cold. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2014.