Bees and Beekeepers at Work

Dandelion flowers mean bees and beekeepers are at work

It’s spring again, the day after Easter, and I see dandelions in my area.  Dandelions are typically out around mid April and in Western PA, they are the official sign of the nectar flow starting.  One thing about being a beekeeper is that you can’t schedule things based on a human calendar: it’s all based on weather. Some years nectar flow starts much earlier, in March, if we have a mild winter and warm spring. Winter was mild but spring has been cold and rainy so far.  We check our little ladies regularly however; after winterizing all the hives in November, we take a peek in late January/early February to make sure their food supplies are good and if it’s warm enough, we’ll pull some frames looking for eggs.  Mite treatments happen in late winter/early spring and we’re already done those. Everyone looks great! I didn’t see many mites, so these bees are going into spring nice and healthy!

Like the dandelions, new honey bee enthusiasts show up wanting to start their own hives.  They are also typically overwhelmed by information. Beekeeping is not an easy hobby and it’s something best learned  from local beekeepers. It’s lifelong learning.  The best advice we got when we started was to find a mentor, and to do that, you should join a club.  What you’ll also find is that all the bee clubs have different philosophies about raising bees, so you need to find the group that is a good ideological fit for you.  For instance, the group we belong to is a proponent of IPM (integrated pest management), which means you treat if needed but you rely on nature to solve the problem if you can.  We don’t treat without testing, in other words, and we don’t treat unless there really is a problem.  This is a more hands on approach, so if you’re more hands off – you might prefer to just treat and not test, for instance. There are so many considerations when raising bees too:  microclimates are just as critical as your general climate.  Beekeeping in urban areas is quite different from beekeeping in rural areas.  Are you hives in the full sun or in the shade? That changes everything too, along with are you near woods, or in a valley? Do you have a clean water supply?  Are there bears?  Predators are a real issue for rural beekeepers and electric fences create their own unique issues as well.   If you fence, by the way, keep your hives at least 6 feet away from the fence. The bees dislike the pulsing electricity and they’ll take it out on you.  The meanest bunch of ladies we ever had was the hive that was too close to the fence.  We have bears – and the highest power electric fence energizer we could purchase.

Every spring, I reread our notes from previous years. Most beekeepers keep bee journals, and if you’re a budding beekeeper, we suggest you do the same.  Although we’re master beekeepers, even well seasoned beekeepers can get into trouble and reviewing past journals (a winter activity) is a good way to prep for what to watch out for.  One would think it’s the same every year but it isn’t; in fact, we’ve found that every year there is something new we haven’t seen before, and that’s where having a club is so handy.  Nothing better than having 30 beekeepers to brainstorm your strange problem.  I’ve had all sorts of new problems: last year I did box rotations a little too early in hindsight since we then had freezing temperatures in the weeks afterwards, which resulted in the bees abandoning the lower box, the exact opposite of what I wanted. The autumn of 2023 I made the mistake of waiting too long to feed for winter, and the bees ended up with a lot of uncured syrup that made me worry all winter (I worried, they were fine).  Think it’s a good idea to take off honey frames to save for later?  Not unless you throw them in the freezer:  moths will attack them.  When to put on new boxes, how many at a time – all these things can go wrong if you fail to read the weather conditions, the forage, etc. We specifically grow vegetables and flowers just to make sure that the bees have forage – and I do water everything, even if drought resistant, because no water = no nectar.  Flowers only produce nectar if there is sufficient moisture.  I learned that the hard way many years ago so last year’s dry summer didn’t matter, I was watering and the bees had plenty of nectar.   

Being a beekeeper also means you should like experimenting with equipment: there is a plethora of equipment and not all is suitable for our specific conditions so it’s always about experimenting. Last few years I’ve been experimenting with different bottom boards (at the bottom of the stack of boxes) and I think I’ve found the “right” one, so last week, I replaced all the bottom boards.  We’ll see if the ladies in those boxes are as nice as the ones in the hive that experimented with the new board in 2024.  Maybe we’ll discover that the “mean” hives were just uncomfortable because they were too cold and the metal drawer was better at insulating than the sliding plastic frame.  I have a stack of experimental equipment that I’ve discarded into a pile in my shed:  might be time to sell it off on Ebay.  Not for me, but it might work for someone else!  I’m done with solid bottom boards.  They were good before mites were a problem, now I think they facilitate mite reinfestation.

Beekeeping is often grouped in with chicken and animal husbandry in general but I assure you, chickens are much easier to raise than bees.  It’s hard to understand bee logic and I do think there is some thinking going on in their heads because just like people, you get reasonable and unreasonable bees, hostile and easy going bees, etc. There are many more factors to consider with bees than chickens, and so many ways things can go wrong. Intellectually, if you like a challenge, bees are fun. There is something very special about being outside, as you tend to your garden with your bees happily working the oregano or in the lawn harvesting nectar from the drifts of clover.  They are very much like humans:  they like sunny, dry days, not too hot or humid.

A busy bee is a happy bee.