1. No harsh chemicals. (We do not use any chemicals in our hives) 2. Use locally produced queens. (We raise and sell from our own survival stock). 3. Screen bottom board. 4. Hive inspection every 2 weeks, especially for monitoring the queen. 5. Yearly requeening is a must! I was not very fond of requeening yearly until a few years ago. I did a little test. I requeened about half of my hives and the other half I allowed the 2-3 year old queens to carry on. Each half consisted of approximately 25 hives. By far, hands down the requeened hives way out performed the hives with the older queens. It was not even close. The hives with the older queens had lower population of bees, weaker foraging power, less honey, less everything. I immediately became a firm believer of requeening a hive every ye

September proves to be the most strategic month to requeen so that the queen is laying strong going into and coming out of winter, and the new queen can lay well in the fall to produce lots of young bees who should overwinter better than older bees. Okay, so those are a handful of our particular philosophy of beekeeping. Now, lets tas talk about getting your hives ready for another winter. What should you do?

Winter is a nervous time for beekeepers. With every snow, and blast of cold, north wind, we wonder and worry how our bees are doing. Months of cold, winds, snow, rain, fog and clouds causes us to fret over our bees well-being. In December, most of us place our ear against the outside of the hive and give a gentle tap to see if they are still buzzing, and usually they are. It is rare for a hive to die in December or even in January. The fact is, most hives that die do not even die in February. They die in March, when they have exhausted their food supply and have few to forage the early nectar on the occasional warm days.

However, they are not fail proof. In fact, here are three concerns that probably cause our hives to die during the winter that many overlook: 1) Queenlessness. Your hive is most certain to die if your queen is weak or gone going into winter. 2) Winter Condensation. If you seal up your hive too tight, you might increase the overall condensation within the hive and cause this cold water to constantly drip onto the cluster and eventually kill your hive. 3) Keeping stored honey next to the winter cluster.

How many times do we hear that a hive died even though there was plenty of honey. So, heres mys my checklist for what you should be doing to your hives now to prepare for a great hive in the spring: 1) Remove queen excluders. 2) Remove honey supers. 3) Examine the amount of stored honey and be sure your bees have plenty. Most beekeepers in the north lift the back of the hive and hope it feels like there is 70 pounds of stored honey. 70 pounds is the approximate equivalent of 1 medium super full of honey. 4) If your hive is short on stored honey, FEED! Feed 2:1 sugar water. Use an internal or top feeder if robbing is a problem. Robbing is more of a problem during the fall dearth. 5) Make sure that your hive has some sort of upper ventilation. It does not have to be much but something. We now make our inner covers with ventilation slots. And we leave our screen bottom boards open all winter. 6) Use good mouse guards, either metal or wooden entrance cleats to keep mice out. 7) Treat the hives 3 weeks in a row with powdered sugar for mite control. This is best started in August. 8) If wrapping hives, be sure to allow upper ventilation. 9) Combine weak hives with strong ones. Most of the small swarms you caught are not going to winter well unless you caught them in May.

Do not feel like a failure if youve wve worked hard to build up your numbers, but now you have to slice your hive count in half by combining hives. Combining ten hives into 5 which survive the winter is better than having 8 out of 10 die out. Much can be said about preparing a hive for winter, but the hive that has the best chance of surviving the winter will be the hive that was very strong all year and has a young queen. Remember, a strong hive is more apt to be pest and disease free, thus overwintering much better because it does not have viruses caused by mites. No matter how much you wrap your hive, medicate your bees and build a wind break, nothing will do much to improve a weak hive overwintering well. Only strong hives overwinter well enough to explode in the spring. Weak hives that do survive the winter usually are not impressive the following year, unless requeened soon in the spring.

This year, I will expand my overwintering experiments. I will be overwintering a variety of configurations to see which hive does best. I will be overwintering 5 frame nucs, single hive bodies and a hive that is made up of 1 deep hive body and 3 medium super boxes. We also have one hive going into winter that we are now feeding pollen and heavy nectar to stimulate the queen to keep laying deep into fall to see if this is better or worse of winter survival. Please put it on your calendar to peak in your hive in January on a decent day when the temperature rises to atleast 40 degrees. Then, make a plan to quickly open your hive on a calm day and in 1 minute or less, pull up a frame of honey, scratch it open and place it next to the cluster. If they have no honey left, then feed! I have a lesson that explains several feeding methods. The lesson can be found at: http://basicbeekeeping.blogspot.com/2008/03/lesson-28-spring-management-of.html