Well, once again it's been a while since I posted and I keep saying that so from now on, I won't. Winter is almost over here in north Texas and I'm starting to see little buds on the trees. I write this post with a little heavy heart because a few weeks ago, I discovered that my bees didn't make it through the winter. I was concerned that they wouldn't mostly because I worry too much about too many things, and that I always second guess my decisions. So when I discovered them dead, I guess I wasn't too surprised. I was really working hard on them and hoping that they would make it through. Since I'm a new bee keeper, I really don't have any firm reason's for their demise, but after closely inspecting the hive, I think I know why.
For all these months, my bees have had two deep hive bodies in which to move about and expand. If you talk to ten veteran bee keepers you may get eleven different answers to any question you may ask. And for pretty much everything I was wanting to learn about bee keeping, I would hear about so many ways to do things, I finally just picked what I thought was what I needed to do. Ideally, you want the bees to store enough honey for them and have enough for you to take and enjoy. My bees never stored enough for me which was okay because it was the first year anyway. I was just wanting them to have enough for themselves. I was wanting to provide the bees with enough room to expand without having too much of an urge to swarm which is why I had two deep boxes. I was hoping that the bees would go between the two bodies using the frames and resources that they had saved for the winter. As I checked the hive late into the fall, the frames were not all full, but they did look to have a sufficient amount of stored honey that would keep them fed. Bees, in order to stay warm and regulate the hive temperature during the winter, will do what's called clustering, which is basically forming a ball around the queen and move about the hive as a cluster taking advantage of the stored honey. What I think happened is that when it got really cold around here for about four days, the bees clustered in the lower body and didn't go into the upper body. When I realized they had died and opened the hive, I discovered some capped honey in the upper body. It may have not been enough for them, but I think it would have been enough to get them through the really cold spell and then I could have fed them sugar water. What I think I should have done, is removed the top box and moved any frames with honey down to the lower box. That way they would have found the honey easier and probably made it through the winter. Oh well. That's how you learn. That's enough for this post. I will post again soon with some interesting news.
