Q Checkerboarding Frames
My bee mentor (vast warehouse of knowledge) says to checkerboard frames of brood and honey, meaning to move full frames of honey to the outside of the nest and empty ones to center of the nest. I have been doing this for two years. It seems to be working. Do you have any thoughts about this? I lost four hives to cold last year in Kansas. The hives were wrapped, and all hives had two medium supers full of honey. Will a wind block prevent this?
Mike Thompson
Kansas, June
A
Checkerboarding is a term for a specific type of management that beekeepers use on their hives to reduce the swarming tendency of the colonies living in them. In simplest terms, a beekeeper performing this management practice will alternate frames of honey and frames of brood/empty comb in the brood nest. This may be done over one or two hive bodies, the latter if the brood nest extends into two or more boxes. The idea is that you are tricking the bees (as if you can trick them) into thinking that there is still more space to store honey and expand the brood nest, thus reducing the swarming tendency of the colony.
I may be reading what you are asking incorrectly, but I am not sure if you are describing checkerboarding. Instead, it sounds like you are simply being encouraged to arrange the brood nest in a way that frames of resources (honey/pollen) are moved to the outside of the hive while empty frames or frames containing brood are moved into the center of the hive. This happens to be the natural nest orientation honey bees prefer. Place a swarm of honey bees into an empty nest cavity and they are going to store honey and pollen on the outer frames (frames 1 and 10 in a typical 10-frame hive) and rear brood in the center frames (frames 2-9). There are aberrations of this orientation, but this is mostly how combs are oriented when bees are given the chance to arrange the combs the way that they want them. It is perfectly okay if you do this to your hives. I, too, tend to move the resource frames to the edges of the nest while keeping the brood frames/empty frames in the center of the nest.
You also mentioned that you lost four colonies during winter. You made the point to say that the colonies had enough food (two supers) and were properly insulated. Look at my answer to the earlier question on winterizing colonies. Did you have Varroa under control well before your colonies headed into winter? If cold really was the problem, the bees need to have a properly insulated hive (which I believe was the case based on the background information that you provided), a reduced entrance, no ventilation other than the nest entrance, and ample honey stores. Doing this, and controlling Varroa, might take care of the problem. Sometimes, though, colonies just die if the conditions are too harsh. A wind break may help, but I suspect that wind was not the cause of death.
Q Bee Choice of Food in the Nest
Because I was a full-time commercial beek for 62 years and have progressed to hobby status over the past eight years, many of our beginners ask questions of me. So, I received a question from a beek with a lot of experience and an observation hive. We are in the depths of winter in Australia and June 23 was the winter solstice. Minimum temperatures have been down as low as 2.4 C (36 F) where I live, and he has noticed that the bees are eating the stored honey and feeding the brood, but they are not taking the nearest honey. They are bypassing that and taking some from farther away. His question is “Why?” I told him I would contact my mentor as I am sure you will know.
Stan Taylor
Australia, June
A
Stan, I think you have too much confidence in me.☺ This is one of those questions for which I do not think an answer is known. Consequently, I can only speculate what may lead to the observation you are making. Bees sometimes do odd things for which we do not have an answer. I suspect this may be one of those times. Nevertheless, I will be happy to speculate.
Honey can go bad in the comb. I have seen honey ferment in the combs many times. So, maybe the honey nearest the brood had gone bad or was beginning to ferment. Also, maybe the bees did eat the honey nearest the brood and then move honey from farther way to the area once occupied by the honey that had already eaten. This would open a different line of speculation: Do honey bees move honey to other areas of the nest?
Maybe the honey they chose had a higher sugar content or a higher water content than the honey nearest the brood. Maybe it contained something else that the bees wanted or needed, something such as a micronutrient. Perhaps the honey they are not choosing was adulterated, maybe with a pesticide or something else. Maybe the beekeeper fed their colonies for a spell, with the honey nearest the brood being that which the bees produced from sugar water. Thus, they could be favoring real honey they collected naturally to that they made from beekeeper-provided food. Maybe what the beekeeper saw was simply a unique occurrence, having happened randomly, never to happen again. Maybe it was something else entirely. My guess is that it was a random occurrence. If I had to choose a second option, I would say that the bees chose the honey they ate because they clearly liked something better about it than they did the honey nearest them. Did the beekeeper make the same observation across all his hives? Was this in an observation hive? Let me know if this trend continues.
Q Winterizing Bees
Summer is humming away. It is beautiful outside. The bees are happy. I am happy. So why I worry about winterizing, I do not know. I live in the Pacific Northwest. Our winters are cold and wet. I lost my hives last winter, so I would like to know what is the best way to set them up for success this coming winter. Should I use a screen board or solid bottom board? If a screen board, do I put in the sticky board to close it up?
I have had fairly good success with putting a candy board on top, then the inner lid, then a super box with insulation inside, and the top cover on the super box. But I lost them all last year with that arrangement. It was a wicked winter, with several days below 0°F (-18°C) and then it moved up quickly to the typical 45-50°F (7-10°C) with windy rain. So, they got wet and cold and that was the end of that.
Do I need to plan for ventilation? I recall that a colony can produce the equivalent of one human in terms of respiration, so I try to imagine a guy all folded up miraculously in the boxes as a reference for respiration needs. It does not snow much here. It is the cold and humidity that we have to contend with.
Jenni Caster
Oregon, July
A
I am sorry to hear about your winter losses. In my experience, winter losses typically boil down to three key issues: insufficient Varroa control in summer/fall, insufficient food reserves, and improper winterizing of hives. I will answer your questions first, and then I will pontificate on the other issues I mentioned.
I would not use screened bottom boards on hives during winter where you live. Bees need proper insulation during winter. A screened bottom board allows significant airflow into the hive, and this can be severely damaging to the colony in a cold climate, like the one in which you live. The only ventilation bees need during winter is that provided at the nest entrance. They do not need upward ventilation, neither do they need the wide entrances one typically sees on a Langstroth-style hive during winter. I, personally, would close any upward ventilation (ventilation occurring toward the upper part of the hive) and reduce the nest entrance to 1-2 inches (~2.5 to 5 cm). Recent research suggests that too much ventilation causes the bees to work too hard to keep the cluster warm. It can be detrimental to the colony.
Likewise, I would ensure adequate insulation around the hive. I admit that I am not an expert on hive insulation. I have only lived in warm climates, in which beekeepers do not typically insulate their hives
during winter. Where you live, though, I think insulating the hive is necessary.
Now, let me double back to the issues that I mentioned. First, it is entirely possible that your bees did not die because of poor insulation, screened bottom boards, etc. Instead, the more likely causes are poor Varroa control and lack of adequate food reserves. If we were talking about this face to face, I would ask you when you last treated for Varroa. Then, I would follow up with asking about the treatment you used. Finally, I would ask you what the mite numbers were in the colonies after treatment. That way, I would have a reasonable idea of treatment efficacy. Varroa play a significant role in
winter losses.
If you convinced me that you had Varroa controlled adequately, I would next move to a line of questioning about food reserves. How much honey did the bees have stored in the nest? Was the honey stored where the bees were clustering? Sometimes, bees can have adequate honey reserves and still starve during winter. This happens when colonies experience a significant cold spell and contract their clusters away from stored honey. If it remains cold, the bees will be unable to break cluster to access the food and could starve to death. This is less of a problem if the hive is adequately insulated, thus allowing the bees to access honey easier on colder days.
At the end of the day, ensure that Varroa are adequately controlled well before, and leading up to, winter. Further, ensure that the colonies have about one medium super’s worth of honey. They need to be queenright and have no unchecked diseases/pests. Finally, ensure that they have adequate insulation. These pointers will solve most of the issues associated with winter losses …
