Metro Atlanta Beekeepers Association

It’s been pretty cold here in Atlanta, much too cold to check the brood pattern.  Opening the hive to observe the brood when the temperatures are below a minimum temperature of sixty degrees can seriously damage or chill the brood, and of course you’ll want to avoid this.   

However, on pretty days you can still enjoy, and learn quite a bit from observing the activity around your hive.  Often you’ll see bees coming and going with pollen on their legs.  Many hardwoods are pollinating now and the bees need to feed their babies.  You may also see some bees circling the front of the hive, in a sort of Ferris wheel flight pattern.  These are baby bees that have recently hatched.  They’re orienting themselves to where “home” is.

Another thing to notice is dead bees at the entranceway.  This is actually a good sign if there aren’t too many.  This is natural attrition and the house bees are simply cleaning up.  A handful of bees (or even two handfuls for a large hive) is normal. 

If it continues to be very cold and you’re unsure if you have any bees at all, you might put your ear to the top box and knock loudly.  You should hear a hum within.  If you don’t, it still doesn’t mean your girls have succumbed.  Just be patient and wait for the weather. 

Spring in the bee hive really starts sometime in January. When this actually begins depends upon the queen’s calculation of when the weather will break and the nectar flow starts. Her goal is to have a strong work force in the field when plants begin producing nectar.

So about the second or third week in January, she begins laying a lot of eggs. If she’s a good strong queen with lots of sperm left in her spermatheca, she can lay approximately 1,500 to 2,000 eggs a day.

Why does she start so early? She wants a strong work force which means a lot of strong, healthy female bees. It takes about twenty days from the time the egg is laid for a female bee to hatch out, and then it takes another three weeks for that girl to reach the foraging stage of her life. If we do a count of days, that puts us roughly into March.

As a beekeeper, the tasks you’ll do in these colder months prepare you and the bees for the fireworks of Mother Nature! Soon the buds will be popping out, the days get longer and warmer, and the nectar flow is on.

Checking the pattern of the brood is a good way to get a feel for your queen – a very, very important member of the hive at all times, but especially right now.  She should be laying eggs furiously, getting her work force ready.  Open the hive, remove one frame near the center, and inspect the pattern of the eggs she’s produced.  Be sure to hold your frame over the hive box while you look at it!  The last thing you want is for the queen to accidentally fall off into the grass or onto the ground while you are looking at the brood.  You could step on her without even knowing it or she might not make it back into the hive since she’s so full of eggs and not able to fly well, if at all.

The frame should hold a half-circle of brood in some stage of development.  Hopefully it will be capped.  This brood should be surrounded by capped honey and possibly some pollen (baby bee food).  You should have at least three or four frames that look like this. 

If there are empty cells within the brood pattern area without any stages of brood, don’t worry about this unless there are lots and lots of them. It is normal for between five percent and ten percent of the cells within the brood pattern to be uncapped and empty, depending upon the ambient temperature.  a heater bee enters one of these cells head first and transfers heat generated in her thorax to larvae in adjacent cells.  These empty cells also serve as storage receptacles for honey that is fed to these heater bees.  Cells may also be empty because an egg doesn’t make it and is pulled out by the bees.  Usually this is because a queen was bred with her own off spring-drone.  The workers are able to detect this anomaly and they pull that egg out.  If there are too many empty cells your queen might be failing or getting old and you might consider replacing her.  (See The Buzz about Bees.  By JÜrgen Tautz.)

Make a note about the position of the cluster in the hive boxes for future reference when it is time to rearrange the brood boxes.  

Carefully replace all frames in exactly the position you found them.  Replace the inner cover.  Make sure the bees have a full jar of 2-1 syrup. 

Replace the outer telescoping cover, making sure to elevate the back of this cover on a twig for ventilation.

Now that you have assessed the colony, you should have a fairly good idea about how the queen is performing.  If a queen is failing badly it could mean the demise of the hive.  Even though it may be getting late to re-queen, as far as hitting the nectar flow at its beginning, waiting any later than this time of year to replace a failing queen is not good.  Remember, the queen begins laying eggs early because the nectar flow hits in late March or early April.  She needs a strong work force of bees in the foraging stages of their lives to be ready for this brief window of opportunity – the peak nectar flow.  In terms of days, it can take forty-five or more days for that queen to be introduced to the hive, to begin laying eggs, and for those eggs to mature and move to the foraging stage.  If you re-queen now, your hive will realize a mature work force around the first part of April.  So, you don’t want to wait any longer to re-queen.  However, once again the weather is a factor for us. For this, and other reasons, I recommend replacing queens in the fall if you decide this is needed.  

Read: Remind yourself of the craft of keeping bees. If you’ve ordered packages, go over the installation process in your mind. Formulate any questions you might have and bring them up to seasoned beekeepers at the next bee club meeting.

Smoker: Practice lighting your smoker. There’s an art to this, and it’s both frustrating and nerve racking to have to keep stopping to re-light the smoker once you’re involved in the bee hive. Try to become proficient at this. 

Wood ware: Paint hives, build frames, install new foundation, and make sure you have enough supers for the coming nectar flow. If you’re a new beekeeper, the wood ware you’ll need is the following:

b. Brood chamber. This is the box in which the queen typically lays her eggs, and the brood is raised. This box contains ten frames with wax foundation.

Some beekeepers use a double brood chamber and this practice has become common in the southeast in recent years. This configuration usually eliminates the need for a queen excluder and gives the queen more egg laying room. However, these boxes are very heavy and lifting one to examine the queen or her laying pattern in the box below can be very, very hard work, particularly for one person.

For this reason, I recommend that new beekeepers begin with eight frame hives.  If I were just starting out, that’s the pathway I’d take.  I say this because, in addition to being easier to heft, the eight frame hive mimics nature.  Hollow trees (the typical home for feral bees) are seldom as wide as the space in a 10 frame hive and thus a lot of honey remains inaccessible. Eight frame hives are also easier to manipulate due to the reduced weight, but on a good year you may have a very tall stack of supers!

c. Honey supers. These typically contain nine frames with foundation. As the bees fill these with honey, the beekeeper places additional, empty supers on top of the ones already filled.

d. Queen excluder. Some beekeepers choose to use a queen excluder if they don’t use a double brood chamber system. This keeps the queen from moving up and laying eggs in the honey supers. However, these excluders also inhibit the workers from moving into the honey supers to store the nectar.

f. Small stick or twig. Arguably the most important piece of bee equipment.  Used twelve months of the year to prop up the outer telescoping cover to improve ventilation.

Paint: The boxes should be painted on the outside only. I use a double coat of primer and a double coat of good outdoor paint. These boxes don’t have to be painted the traditional white, but can be either colorful or painted to blend in with surroundings.

Base: All of this goes on top of some sort of block or base. You never want to put your hive directly on the ground! I use four cement blocks with the holes in the center not lined up.  You don't want to form a clear walkway from the ground to the hive. 

Choose a place for your bees that’s sunny, with the entrance facing east or southeast if possible. The hive should be away from pathways, out of low spots, and camouflaged from fussy neighbors if necessary.

Feeders: You’ll also need to decide what kind of feeder you’ll use. The Boardman feeder is placed on the outside of the hive and is visible to the beekeeper. Other kinds of feeders that are placed inside the hive are also used. The contents of these inside-the-hive feeders are not readily visible, but they will hold more feed and may inhibit robbing that might occur when using Boardman feeders. I prefer the Boardman in the warmer months because I can see how much syrup my girls are taking.

In colder weather I use an empty super on top of the inner cover and place the feed there where it’s closer to the cluster and more likely to be found since bees work up in search of their food.  This enclosed top feeding provides protection from freezing.

Journal: One other thing I’d recommend is a journal to keep tabs on not only the conditions of the hive (especially if you have more than a few), but also your personal thoughts and comments on what the bees are teaching you. The bees are wonderful teachers and most likely part of why you became interested in beekeeping has to do with some fascination you have with nature. Don’t miss the opportunity to record this, both for yourself and for generations to come.