Lesson 65: Screen Bottom Boards In The Winter? Fall & Winter Feeding

Hello, we are David & Sheri Burns from Long Lane Honey Bee Farms in Central Illinois.
Today, I want to address a few controversial issues about preparing a colony for winter. For example, screen bottom boards are of tremendous benefit in reducing mites in the summer, but should we leave these open for the winter winds? And, what about feeding bees in the winter? How can we feed bees without the sugar water freezing? Before I address these and other issues, let me remind you of our upcoming beekeeping class.













Those of you who have visited us know why we are called Long Lane Honey Bee Farms. We live down a long lane, a long gravel lane and with heavy trucks coming and going, our road is constantly full of potholes. So, we added Thomas the Tractor to our arsenal against potholes. A 1958 Case 800 tractor with a front pallet fork and a rear box scraper. I'm a penny pincher. When we first moved here, I had 5 loads of gravel dumped in piles down my lane and for weeks, my son and I used shovels and rakes to smooth it out. I've been working on Thomas for a couple of weeks, repairing hydraulic lines but now the old tractor has joined the work force at the honey bee farm.
LESSON 66: Screen Bottom Boards In The Winter & Fall & Winter Feeding
In a previous lesson, I shared several approaches on how to prepare for winter. In this lesson I want to go into more detail about screen bottom boards and winter feeding.
Screen bottom boards prove to be very beneficial in the summer for reducing mites and for increasing ventilation. But do they pose a threat to a colony during the winter? That's a debated issue. Some cover their screen bottom boards while others leave them open. A few years ago, we did a simple test. We placed covers over 3 colony's screen bottom board and left the others open. We lost all three that were covered. So we always leave our screen bottom boards open all winter. It is our opinion that an open screen bottom board cuts down on excessive moisture. Cold air sinks and warm air rises, so the threat of an open screen bottom board, in our opinion, is minimal.

If your hive is up in the air 6 or 8 inches, then you want to prevent cold wind from curling up and blowing onto the cluster. This can be accomplished by building a wind block around your hive.
Remember, that a winter cluster warms only the cluster and not the inside of the hive. On an extremely cold night, the air several inches away from the cluster will be the same as outside the hive. The bees consume honey, and vibrate by flexing their muscles to generate heat, much like we do when we shiver. That heat is transferred throughout the cluster. They will be able to accomplish generating the cluster heat with or without the screen covered.
WHAT ABOUT WINTER FEEDING?
Many beekeepers allow their colonies to become extremely undernourished. Pollen and stored honey is essential to winter survival of colonies. In the fall, I work to beef up my colonies. It's tricky for me because of the number of colonies in one location. Even an inside top feeder can create a robbing frenzy. In the fall, boardman feeders placed in the front of hives is a certain robbing disaster.
So my approach is two fold. 1) During the fall only, after most nectar is no longer available, I want to prevent robbing, and 2) I want to beef up my colony nutrition for winter.
You can click on the images for a larger view. My approach is simple. I do use boardman feeders, but I place them on stands throughout the bee yard. And on dry days, I pour dry pollen out on the feed stands. My sugar mix is two parts sugar and one part water for fall. I have to make the holes bigger in the lids for the syrup to pass through. I also add one teaspoon of Honey-B-Healthy. Also, notice the bees on top of the jars? I make sugar patties too. I mix sugar syrup with powdered sugar until it mixes a little stiffer than play dough. The bees love these sugar patties. I placed one on the top of each jar as you can see in the picture.
So my fall feeding consist of dry pollen, hard sugar patties and 2:1 sugar syrup. Several people have asked me what 2:1 sugar means in measurements. I fill a gallon jar with between 32-48 ounces of very hot water. Then, I add sugar until it reaches the top which is around 7-8 pounds. Then stir it up. I will continue this type of feeding until the bees are clustered for winter.
Another very effective winter feeding method is to make the sugar patties I mentioned above and lay on the tops of frames just above the cluster. Because it is a solid sugar feed, you do not have to worry about it freezing. The heat of the cluster will keep it warm and eatable.
As the weather warms up above freezing, you can place pale feeders in the hive. I sometimes place jars of sugar water over the inner cover hole and then place a deep hive body without the frames so that the bees can consume the sugar water when it warms enough for the bees to break cluster. The deep hive body serves as a spacer around the jar. The top cover goes above the deep hive body spacer.
Another important feed application is that of internal pollen patties. If pollen sources are low within a colony, brood patties should be placed above the cluster. Again, on warmer winter days, the cluster will loosen enough so that bees can feed upon the pollen patties which contain a pollen substitute allowing the bees to consume the protein, vitamins, lipids and amino acids they need. ALWAYS leave the wax paper on the patty. The bees will eat around it, and usually they consume the paper too. If you remove the wax paper, the patty can become moldy and too gooey and fall between the frames.
We do sell the sugar patties, pollen patties as well as the screen bottom boards. Give us a call if you need these items or other beekeeping items.
Feel free to order your hives for the spring by calling us at 217-427-2678. We take credit cards over the phone, or you can order online by clicking here.
We always appreciate your business, whether it is for your woodenware hive needs, queens, packages, nucs, clothing or extraction equipment, we always appreciate your loyalty.
Here's how you can contact us:
Phone: 217-427-2678
Email: david@honeybeesonline.com
Web Address: http://www.honeybeesonline.com/
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Until next time, remember to BEE-Have yourself!

David & Sheri Burns
Long Lane Honey Bee Farms
Fairmount, Illinois

Lesson 64: Why Is Honey So Good For Us?

Hello Friends! We are David & Sheri Burns operating our family honey bee business in Central Illinois where summer seems to be giving way to fall. We've had a few cool nights in the mid to upper 40s so it seems like fall.
NEWS FROM AROUND OUR FARM
Sheri's chickens are laying about 5 eggs a day, not quite enough to keep up with our family's need, but they are just now 20 weeks old. Every day we all race out to the chicken coop to gather up the eggs. I didn't realize until I read up on it that fresh eggs are much better for you than older eggs. Speaking about what's good for us...we all know that honey is good for us. And in today's lesson I want to give you some information explaining why honey is so good for us. Before I start today's lesson, let me continue to bring you up to date on what we've been doing.
I bought an old farm tractor,  a 1958 Case 800 with a front end loader. We are always plowing, digging and hauling things around, so this will be a big help for us. I bought it on Ebay and hauled it up out of southern Illinois last Saturday. It's two years older than me!
Two weekends ago we had a wonderful group at our beekeeping and queen rearing courses we offered at our honey bee farm. We had people here from Ohio, Missouri, Illinois and California. The students were very enthused about keeping bees and raising queens. The weather was great so we were able to spend some time in the hives as well.

Our honey crop was good and we were able to bottle up a good amount of beautiful tasting honey and our customers have lined up to buy it before we run out as they do every year. Our customer's appetite for honey is greater than our bee's ability to keep up with demand.
This will be our last month to produce queens. It becomes much more difficult to produce late queens but this is when so many people want to requeen, in September. Once again we gained so much knowledge and skill in our queen rearing operation. Can't wait until next year!! Where we really need to improve is in overall production of our queens. We have the quality where we want it, but now we must increase quantity. We had to turn away so many request.
on including the location and directions: http://www.easternmobeekeepers.com/meetings.htm
And for those of you who are Studio Bee Live addicts, we are producing more finally! These are broadcast that we produce here on our farm and place on the Internet. These broadcasts are located at: http://www.honeybeesonline.com/studiobeelive.html Check it out!
LESSON 64: Why Is Honey So Good For Us?
Nutritional Value
What's in honey? The actual chemical make up of honey can be slightly different based on the local nectar sources. Typically, honey consists of simple sugars known as glucose (dextrose) and fructose (levulose).
Bees do not gather honey from flowers. They gather nectar which is a sugary substance from plants which is very high in moisture. The bees carry the nectar to the hive and then hand it over to carriers in the hive. These carriers work the nectar droplet. Invertase is added by the bee who works the nectar to help evaporate the moisture from the nectar. This goes on for nearly several minutes and then the nectar is placed in the comb where it dries even more. Bees fan the open cells of nectar to cure it by evaporating the moisture level down to around 18%. Then it becomes honey and is sealed over with a wax cap.
Honey is made up of Moisture (17-18%), Fructose (around 40%) Glucose (around 30%) and other sugars, vitamins, minerals, and complex carbohydrates.
Honey is fat free, sodium free and cholesterol free! Honey does have vitamins like B6 and thiamin, niacin, and riboflavin. Honey contains minerals that are good for us like calcium, copper, iron magnesium, manganese, phosphorus, potassium, and zinc.
Antioxidants are also found in honey, such as chrysin, pinobanksin, vitamin C, catalase and one antioxidant that is only found in honey, pinocebrin.

This nutritional information was obtained from the National Honey Board's website.
Honey is the only unprocessed food that never spoils. Sometimes honey will become hard or solid. This natural process is known as granulation or crystallization. For the most part all honey will eventually crystallize over time, but some takes much longer than others. The deciding factor is the type of nectar or floral source from which the nectar was gathered which determines the sugar content.
What causes honey to crystallize or granulate? Since honey is composed of glucose and fructose, this high concentration of the sugar begins to separate out and can then form crystals. Remember that honey is 70% sugar and 20% or less of water. Any small particle such as pollen specs, or even air bubbles will provide a seed for these sugar crystals to begin to grow. We count on this process in making our cream honey. We just grind the seed crystals to be extremely small so it makes the honey feel creamy.
Granulated honey is not spoiled. It can be warmed and most of the crystals can be re-liquefied. Remember, all honey will eventually granulate unless it has been heated to 140-160 degrees and highly filtered to remove all particles. Of course, heating honey damages it by removing or killing valuable enzymes.
Something that often does follow granulation is fermentation because water is forced out of the sugar in the granulation process. This extra water causes the honey to ferment. Natural yeast within the honey will begin the process of turning your honey into mead or alcohol when the moisture level is above 18%.
Honey absorbs water? It will absorb it from the room you process it in. That's why I keep my processing room around 30-35% humidity and dry my supers 3 days before I process the honey. I've never had a fermentation issue.
What is the shelf life of honey? A long time! Do not put it in the refrigerator. It is fine left at room temperature.
Many people including myself use honey on skin injuries. I recently spoke with a hand surgeon and he explained to me that honey can keep a wound very moist to aid in healing yet kill bacteria. Honey kills bacteria because it is hygroscopic. This means that honey absorbs moisture from bacteria that tries to grow.  This is why honey is such a safe food to eat no matter how long it has sat out, maybe centuries!
Thanks for joining me today, and I really enjoy preparing these lessons each week.
I want to remind you that we manufacture our own hives, built to our own specifications because we are beekeepers. Please check out our website at: http://www.honeybeesonline.com for all the honey bee products we carry including hives!
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Here's our contact information:
PHONE: 217-427-2678
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Until next time Bee-have yourself!

David & Sheri Burns
Long Lane Honey Bee Farms
14556 N. 1020 East Road
Fairmount, IL 61841