Winter Beekeeping Is About Learning

One thing I have learned the hard way through the years is that when it comes to careing for those who cannot tell you something is wrong, you need to learn what can go wrong BEFORE it happens.

Bees depend on their beekeeper to be vigilant and help them avoid calamities before they happen. If we wait until the evidence of a disease is obvious, or worse, don't know what to look for and so notice nothing, it will usually be too late to help much.
To that end I am using these chilly months to refresh my knowledge of bee diseases so that I can head them off in time.
Here's one problem with my winter hive that was not so tough to solve. 

 

But unfortunately the mouse already had gone down the floor of the hive, chewing up the bottom two inches of each comb. Note to self: It IS important that roofs fit tight on a hive, not just "kind of" tight. Mice, I have learned, can fit into a crack the size of a pencil.

If you are using your winter wisely and sharpening your bee skills too, I would suggest a perusal of my "bee resources page" where I have compiled links to several useful sites and videos on bee diseases. I have also recently found this concise pamphlet on honey bee diseases.
And remember: an ounce of prevention...

The Science of Bee Candy

This is not a lid on this jar, it is a sheet of crystallized syrup. The little holes are from the bees drinking through the holes punched in the lid, kind of like Eskimos ice fishing.

One of the things I do to help my bees get through the winter is to give them syrup in the fall so they can top up their honey stores before the real cold sets in when they will need to have plenty of food at hand to keep themselves warm.
I am not an expert on bees, but this is one thing I think really does help them. In the spring I check for extra honey ( hoping to harvest some for us) and I find no extra honey. Just one comb of it in fact. That tells me they needed every drop of syrup I fed them in the previous fall.
One of our problems is that I became a bee keeper on one of the worst springs for bees because of its late low temperatures and record setting rain. A record, that is, until this year.
So I have been keeping the bees supplied with syrup. It can't hurt.
One of the weird things that I have been dealing with though is that sometimes the syrup crystallizes in the jars.
I cannot figure out why it only does it sometimes. It feels like I am making the syrup the same way each time, yet about every fourth time it does this.

I suspect it has to do with SCIENCE. I found this explanation of why candy crystallizes and that helped me understand a little better what the crystallizing process is. But it only alludes to the fact that it only takes a little shock to make sugar crystallize. I have also heard that the trick to keeping sugar crystals from forming is to add an acid, like cream of tarter or lemon juice. Also crystals will not form if something comes between the molecules, like a simple molecule of corn syrup or honey.
In my search I found this cool reference from an 1888 article where readers sent in their recipes for bee syrup and what their results have been.
You will see that it is not a new topic for bee keepers and the variety of methods and outcomes they list are just as diverse as it is today.
It's amazing how something that seems so simple can get so complex.

More on Grease Patties and Hunkerin' Down for Winter

If you look close you can see a passageway into the feeder through the grease pattie.

Buck and I did give the grease patties one more try for the Fall hoping to head off any spurt in the mite population. I don't know if it worked. Spring will tell.
The funny thing is that we tried to trick the bees into walking on the grease patties by building a globby hoop for them to have walk through to get to the syrup in the syrup feeder.
After my last try with grease patties I was expecting the bees to avoid the grease patties. But when we started putting it into the hive the bees seemed to be really happy to see it. They happily began licking on it.
But the next week we opened the hives to check the syrup level and were surprised to find that hardly any syrup was gone and the bees had once again stacked dead bees and debris onto the grease patties.
We decided to just clean the grease patties out and leave the bees to their syrup.

One week later, covered in dead bees but looking like it had been eaten on.

Then I was at the hay house a week later and I noticed that when I open the door a couple of bees flew in and started trying to pry open the half empty bag of grease patties I had set on the feed barrel.
They are giving me very mixed signals. Do they only like it fresh? Do only a few bees like it and the rest hate it and stack dead things on it? Do they only like grease pattie on Sundays and all the rest of the week it is sinful?
It's a mystery.
We will put straw in the hive attics and their bottom boards on this week to keep them warm for the winter but let the hive breath too. It has been colder this month than in the past. It's so cold out  I  have a hankerin' for some grease pattie. MMMM grease and sugar.