The management of your bees and the key to good bee beekeeping is all about seasonal care of your honeybees. By scheduling your tasks around the flow of nectar, you can ensure that your home bee beekeeping achieves the best possible results in the minimum time. Naturally, a beginner (and even advanced) bee beekeeper wants their colonies to reach maximum strength before the nectar flows begin. This way, bees store the honey as surplus that the beekeeper can then harvest instead of using the honey to complete their spring build-up.
Feeding and medicating should therfore be done in Winter (or January through to February if you are in Europe). This is the time that Queens resume laying eggs and the brood grows more rapidly to provide a strong spring work force.
So, to help build your bee beekeeping colony make sure they have plenty of food. If you notice that your home beekeeping colonies are light when you hoist them from the rear, they need sugar syrup. Mix syrup (one part sugar, one part water) and feed the bees heavily. Commercially available pollen supplements provide extra protein for population growth, but the above recipe will do just fine. This is also the time to check for any diseases or illnesses. Feed all medications that they need early enough to allow for withdrawal periods before nectar flows begin.
By the beginning of spring the your beekeeping hives are ready for detailed inspection. On warm days check your bee colonies for population growth, the arrangement of the brood nest and disease symptoms. Colonies with less brood than average can be strengthened by giving them frames of sealed brood from stronger neighbors. If you use two hive bodies, most of the bees and brood may be in the upper body with little activity in the bottom one. If so, reverse the hive bodies, putting the top one on the bottom. This relieves congestion and discourages swarming. If you use one hive body, relieve congestion by providing honey supers above a queen excluder. Swarming should be avoided because it severely reduces colony strength.
Annual requeening, whether in early spring or in autumn, is one of the best investments a home beekeeper can make. Compared to older queens, young queens lay eggs more prolifically and secrete higher levels of pheromones which, in turn, stimulate workers to forage, suppress swarming and suppress disease outbreak. To requeen a colony, find, kill and discard the old queen. Let the colony remain queenless for 24 hours then introduce the new queen. With a new queen, you can also make a new colony by taking frames of brood, honey and bees from a strong colony (leaving behind the old queen), placing them in a new hive body with a new queen then moving the new hive to a new location. This controlled “splitting” of a colony lets a home beekeeper manage the swarming process.
If you feed your colonies, medicate them, requeen them and control swarming, they should be strong enough to collect surplus nectar by the end of spring. This is the time to add honey supers above the hive bodies. Add plenty of supers to accommodate incoming nectar and the large bee populations; this stimulates foraging and limits late-season swarming. As nectar comes in, bees place it in cells and evaporate it to about 18 per-cent water content. When bees cap the honey, it is considered ripe.
Remember that not all honeys are alike. Usually, lighter honeys command higher prices, and most beekeepers try to keep darker honeys from mixing with lighter ones. For example, some beekeepers remove supers with dark tulip poplar honey before it can mix with incoming sourwood honey which is lighter.
During late summer and early autumn, brood production and honey production drop. Don’t be concerned! This is perfectly normal and all bee beekepers will experience the same thing. Unlike in spring, you should now crowd the bees by giving them only one or two honey supers. This forces bees to store honey in the brood nest. Colonies are usually overwintered in two hive bodies or in one hive body and at least one honey super. If you overwinter in one hive body and a honey super, remove the queen excluder so the queen can move up into the honey during winter. Colonies should weigh at least 100 pounds in late autumn. If they are light on stores, feed them a heavy syrup (two parts sugar one part water) until they gain weight.
Good Luck!!!
