The End of the Beekeeping Season: What Happens in the Hive

The Winter report on The Grain Store’s bee community.

One of our site gardeners, Louis from Porter-Hardy Gardens Ltd. with this season’s honey harvest.

The beekeeping season is over. The harvest is in, and the four hives at Littledown Apiary are in their winter configurations already, with the bees hunkering down, preparing for the cold weather that is to come. But what does all this mean, and how do the bees know?

Essentially, honey bees respond to a few key triggers, mainly nectar flow, temperature and day length. As the day shortens and the summer flowers go to seed, the bees will give up ideas of swarming. The nectar flow dries up so the queen stops laying as the bees have less food available with which to feed her.

This means there are fewer bees, fewer mouths to feed – and even fewer once the annual cull of the drones occurs around the start of autumn. With no need for further mating flights, there’s no need for drones, which become useless mouths to feed. The workers – who control the processes within the colony – will push and shove the drones out the hive entrance and refuse to allow them to re-enter. They will starve, all for the benefit of the greater good: the survival over winter of the colony and, in particular, the queen who carries the colony’s precious genetic payload. 

Bees in winter

Any bees born now will need to survive until spring – up to six months – unlike their much shorter-lived spring and summer predecessors who live for just six short weeks. And that’s why honey bees collect honey.

They don’t know how much they will need to survive the winter so they collect as much as they can, when they can. Fortunately for us, they usually collect far more than they will need – and if they actually need more, the beekeeper will provide them with a suitable substitute. This beekeeper always leaves each colony with at least 20Kg of their own honey – that’s one super, or shallow box – and takes the rest.

This is normally sufficient. However, recent winters have been fairly mild, which paradoxically results in more flying and so greater energy expenditure over the colder months. The result is that they have been needing more food. I will be monitoring their usage over winter and adding more should they need it.

As it gets colder, the bees will cluster tightly together, generating heat by shivering their wing muscles. In the centre where the queen is, temperatures can reach up to 20 degrees even when it’s freezing outside.

To help them, I have installed insulation to conserve that heat, and located the super containing honey underneath the brood box. The bees always move those stores back above the brood nest which means firstly that they can easily access food without having to leave the cluster, and it means I can feed the cluster directly from above should it be necessary without disturbing them.

For now, together with treatments to reduce the numbers of parasitic varroa mites, that is all that can be done. The rest is up to the bees.

- Manek Dubash

The Beekeeper, Littledown Apiary