Supplementing Winter Stores

This is the first season for many that I have had to supplement winter stores on three out of four colonies because I am not convinced that they had stored enough honey now, or will do before the end of autumn. This may be due to longer that usual brood breaks and smaller foraging workforces combined with a generally inconsistent nectar flow during the active season.

Whatever the reason, I’m not taking any chances and at this stage I am not familiar enough with BroodMinder hive weight recordings to estimate how much they need for winter based on weight. I looked down on the brood frames from above to assess and found enough honey-fattened bulging frames in this single brood box above. However, they had eaten a lot of the honey stored in the shallow box above (super) over recently poor weather. Ivy is flowering now and you can see the yellow pollen directly above, and so is the Himalayan balsam which has gone on producing for a couple of months. The bee on the bottom right has been down at the river on the Himalayan balsam. Two weeks ago, the nearby field of phacelia was cut down and foraging there came to an abrupt end. The bees may collect more ivy nectar but this fondant will give them a boost.

Fondant

I decided to try a new way of offering fondant this year and I have rolled it out thinly like the Christmas cake icing it closely resembles. I placed in on very fine mesh (sold to collect propolis on) so that it doesn’t drip through on the bees. I hoped that I had rolled it flat enough to fit under the clear crown board―fortunately I had because I was introducing my niece from the south, and her friend from the US, to the bees for the first time and I didn’t want to disrupt the bees any more than necessary.  Neither visitor wanted to get stung—and they didn’t. The bees were not at all defensive and the temperature was a surprising 17 °C. A one-off! The bees have plenty room to access the fondant and I can easily see when I need to top it up. Thank you, Helen, for taking all these photos

Pollen Supplements Not for Winter Bees

I have never given pollen supplements because in spring my bees have access to abundant pollen sources, but in some places they don’t and it is a good thing to do in spring. However, supplementing pollen in autumn is probably a waste of time and money and not advantageous to the bees according to work by Mattila and Otis from as far back as 2007. They were testing a hypothesis that additional pollen in autumn could boost the performance of the winter bees, and to test this they manipulated pollen income in the study colonies and discovered that more pollen didn’t enhance the quality of winter bees and that restricted pollen made no difference to the quality of these bees either.

Contrary to what one might think, supplementing pollen did not increase winter bee population. Rather, the declining pollen stimulated winter bee production. So, the implications for beekeepers are that when summer seasons are poor and pollen dwindles earlier winter bees are produced earlier too, so varroa treatments need to be given earlier if one is treating colonies.
When the study colonies were fed more pollen in autumn, they went on producing more brood for longer and there was a greater delay in the production of winter bees. Many of the bees that were produced when extra pollen was given were short-lived and died before winter. On the other hand, the colonies that had reduced pollen intakes earlier produced winter bees earlier than otherwise.

When it came to assessing the quality of the physiological state and brood rearing potential of winter bees, when brood rearing ramped up in spring, supplementing with pollen in spring was more important than in autumn. Colonies that had the largest populations of overwintered bees and spring-reared brood were the ones that had had the highest populations of winter bees the previous November.

Reference.

Mattila, H.R. and Otis, G.W., 2007. Manipulating pollen supply in honey bee colonies during the fall does not affect the performance of winter bees. The Canadian Entomologist, 139(4), pp.554-563.