Welcome to the Lane County Beekeepers Association!

May marks a very busy time for our bees, and a very busy time for us beekeepers too! It is a time when the hives are rapidly expanding. But it is also when the early spring blooms are fading and the full nectar flow of blackberries and other crops may not have started yet. If you recently bought nucleus hives (nucs), have small or weaker hives, or have put in naked (undrawn) frames, you may need to feed your hives to boost their strength.

Building wax on new frames is incredibly energy intensive and usually only the young, strongest bees do it. It takes roughly 6-8 pounds of honey for the young bees (12-to-18 days old) to make one pound of wax. As we know, wax is the primary building material in the hive for the basic comb structure, brood cells, nectar and pollen storage, and overall hive maintenance. One of the best things you can give your colonies at this time of year is drawn comb, from which the bees can reuse the wax. But if you don’t have that, the next best thing is ample food supplies and good nutrition to support wax production. So, until you put honey supers on, keep feeding with a 1:1 sugar syrup solution if active wax production is needed.

As I said, this is also a busy time for the beekeeper. Besides keeping up with feeding, we also must be doing any final Varroa mite treatments before honey supers go on, and we must take active steps to mitigate swarming. Conditions that often induce swarming behavior include: an old queen, rapid population growth that causes overcrowding, excess availability of nectar and pollen, and reduced hive ventilation. So as good bee stewards, we need to be alert to these triggers and take appropriate action before our bees swarm. That may require us to add additional brood boxes, replace aging queens, or split a hive.  

Happy Beekeeping!   Norm

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