Seasonal Management of Bees

Effective bee management throughout the year requires specific practices to ensure the colony thrives and maximizes honey production. These practices vary depending on the season, local conditions, and the species of bee (Apis cerana or A. mellifera).

Key Principles of Bee Management:

1. Ensuring a strong foraging force of bees for nectar collection.
2. Providing space for storing and ripening nectar into honey.
3. Harvesting honey at the appropriate time.
4. Preparing colonies to handle dearth periods and potential threats from bee enemies.

Spring Management: The spring season is crucial for building the colony’s strength and preparing it for the upcoming honey flow. In regions with cold winters, spring marks the beginning of beekeeping activities.

Practices to follow during Spring:

• Hive Inspection: Remove protective covering from lightly packed hives. In heavily packed colonies, wait until the temperature reaches around 16°C. Inspect the colonies on sunny days to check food stores and the general condition of the colony. Ensure the colony has enough food and space for brood rearing.
• Brood Frame Management: Equalize colony strength by providing brood frames to weaker colonies. Colonies that are queenless or have drone layers should be united with stronger colonies or provided with a mated queen.
• Feeding: Provide stimulatory feeding with a dilute sugar syrup (30% sugar solution) to support brood rearing. If necessary, provide raised combs or frames with comb foundation to ensure enough space for brood rearing.
• Regular Inspections: Inspect colonies at least once a week, clean debris from bottom boards, and provide empty frames as needed. Ensure that colonies have at least 5 kg of food stores.
• Preventing Spring Dwindling: Ensure colonies are not dwindling due to old bee mortality. Provide additional stores and brood frames from stronger colonies if needed.
• Colony Strength and Swarming: As colonies grow in strength, they may become prone to swarming, especially when spring arrives. Manage the colonies carefully to prevent swarming.
• Swarming and Control:

Swarming is a natural behavior that occurs when a colony becomes overcrowded. Swarms consist of worker bees and the old queen, and they leave the colony to form a new one.

• Causes of Swarming: Overcrowding, presence of an old queen, sudden honey flow, or lack of space for egg laying and honey storage.
• Swarming Indications: Queen cells appear on the lower edges of combs. Many bees cluster outside the hive, indicating overcrowding.
• Prevention: To avoid swarming, ensure there is enough space by adding empty combs or shifting sealed brood to another hive. Remove queen cells regularly. Provide shade and ventilation to the hives. Requeen colonies annually and replace old queens with young, laying queens.
• Demaree Method for Swarm Control: Remove queen cells and shift the brood chamber to a second hive body with combs for storage. Use a queen excluder and re-inspect regularly to prevent swarming.
• Catching and Hiving a Swarm: Use a swarm-catching basket to capture swarms that have settled in nearby trees or bushes. The queen enters first, followed by the rest of the bees. After catching the swarm, transfer them to a prepared hive with frames of brood, pollen, and honey.

Summer management of honeybees

This detailed guide on summer management of honeybees emphasizes various essential practices that help beekeepers maximize honey production while ensuring the well-being of the colony. Here’s a summary of the key points:

Honey Flow

• Definition: The period when honey bees gather and store surplus honey in the hive, usually after the colony has reached peak population.
• Indications: Whitening of honey cells (due to fresh wax deposition). Increased quantity of burr and brace combs. Significant weight increase in colonies (can be monitored using stage balance).
• During Honey Flow: Colonies should be populous but without swarming tendencies. Focus on honey collection rather than brood rearing. Keep colony morale high for maximum honey production.

Supering

• What to Do:
  • Provide supers (additional boxes) as soon as honey flow begins.
  • Examine colonies for diseases, the presence of the queen, and whether the queen is laying well before adding supers.
  • Place a queen excluder between the brood chamber and super to prevent the queen from laying eggs in the super.
  • Prevent swarming by ensuring there is enough space, possibly by removing sealed brood to the super chamber.
  • Provide drawn combs (or comb foundation sheets with at least one or two drawn combs) for bees to build on.
  • Use full-depth supers as they are more practical and interchangeable.
  • Add a second super between the brood chamber and the first super when needed.
  • If there’s a lack of drawn combs, consider removing partially sealed honey frames for extraction and return empty combs.

Honey Extraction

• When to Extract: Only remove sealed honey combs for extraction. Avoid unripe honey due to high moisture content that can lead to fermentation. Remove supers early in the morning before bees start filling combs with unripe honey.
• Extraction Process:
  • Use a smoker to calm the bees before removing honey combs.
  • Brush off bees with a soft brush or green grass.
  • Place honey combs in bee-tight hive bodies and transport them to the extraction room.
  • Uncap honey frames using an uncapping knife (heated with steam or boiling water).
  • Place uncapped frames in a honey extractor and operate at 150 RPM for 1-2 minutes, reversing frames to extract honey from both sides.
  • Return cleaned frames to the colony for reuse.
• Precautions: Always leave some honey in the colony (5-10 kg for Apis mellifera and 2-3 kg for A. cerana) for their food needs, especially during the dearth period. Ensure the extraction area is bee-tight and clean. Strain the honey using muslin cloth while it’s still warm for better quality. Purify beeswax by boiling it in a water bath after uncapping.

Challenges During Summer:

• Heat and Dearth: The honey flow is often followed by a summer dearth period, marked by hot winds and temperatures exceeding 40°C. This leads to:
  • Increased mortality of old bees that have worked hard during the honey flow season.
  • A decrease in colony population.
  • Drone expulsion from the colony.
  • Increased attacks from bee enemies and robbing activity, especially in A. cerana colonies, which are more prone to absconding if not managed well.

Management Practices:

1. Provide Shade: Shift colonies to shaded areas or provide shelter like open straw huts to protect them from the heat.
2. Ensure Proper Ventilation: Raise the brood chamber or super slightly to ensure proper ventilation, preventing robbing and allowing airflow without disrupting the bees. Close cracks and crevices in the hive to keep enemies and robbing bees out.
3. Maintain Brood Production: Avoid keeping colonies broodless for extended periods to ensure the colony remains active and productive.
4. Food Stores: If colonies have been heavily stripped of honey during extraction, provide supplemental food stores to avoid starvation. Do not examine the colonies too frequently to minimize stress on the bees. Restrict the number of frames based on the colony strength to prevent overcrowding.
5. Protect from Heat: In areas where temperatures exceed 40°C, place moistened gunny bags or straw packs on top of the colonies to cool them down. Moisten the packs twice a day.
6. Provide Fresh Water: Honeybees maintain the hive temperature by collecting water, evaporating it by fanning inside the hive. Set up a source of fresh water in the apiary by hanging an earthen pitcher with a hole at the bottom. The pitcher should be filled with water and equipped with a wick that allows water to drip onto sloping stones or logs.

Monsoon Management:

The monsoon season (June to September) brings various challenges for beekeepers, particularly in tropical and subtropical regions. Bees face issues related to pests, predators, humidity, and starvation during this period. Here are the key management practices to ensure healthy colonies:

1. Unite Queenless Colonies: Weak colonies that have become queenless should be united with colonies that have a healthy queen, as virgin queens cannot mate during the monsoon due to the absence of drones.
2. Prevent Broodlessness: Ensure that colonies do not become broodless. If there is a lack of pollen stores and fresh pollen, feed the colonies with pollen substitutes or pollen supplements.
3. Supplement Food Stores: If colonies have poor food stores (below 5 kg), provide them with sugar candy or dry sugar instead of sugar syrup, which is less effective in humid conditions.
4. Pest and Predator Control: Keep the colony safe from enemies such as wax moth, ants, mites, and wasps that tend to increase during the wet season.
5. Hive Positioning: Keep hives on sloping stands to ensure that water does not accumulate inside the hive and drains away from the entrance.

Autumn/Fall Management:

Management during autumn depends on local climatic and floral conditions. In some areas like Himachal Pradesh, there may be a second honey flow. However, in regions where no such flow occurs, the focus shifts toward preparing colonies for the wintering period. Below are the key practices:

1. Reducing Hive Space: As the honey flow slows, reduce the hive space to match the colony’s needs for the winter period. Restrict food storage space to the lower hive body so that bees are forced to store winter stores there instead of the super.
2. Natural Queen Replacement: In autumn, many colonies naturally replace their old queens, as they raise queen cells for supersedure. The new queen will kill the old queen upon emergence.
3. Overwintering Preparation: Ensure that colonies have a vigorous and productive queen. An ideal queen should lay eggs at a high rate and produce a sufficient number of young bees for the winter months. Replace failing queens early in the fall so that colonies produce enough young bees for winter survival. Colonies should be free from disease before the winter season. Reduce comb space by removing excess frames to match the colony’s size, ensuring the bees can cover the remaining frames effectively.
4. Feeding for Winter: If colonies have insufficient honey stores, provide heavy sugar syrup. To prepare the syrup, dissolve 2 parts sugar in 1 part boiling water and add 1 tablespoon of tartaric acid for every 50 kg of sugar to prevent crystallization. Feed this syrup into combs, and exchange the combs for empty ones in the hive.

Precautions: Feed sugar syrup only when the outside temperature is warm enough for bees to consume the syrup and store it in the combs. To avoid robbing, feed colonies in the evening, when bees are less likely to engage in robbing behavior.