getting ready for winter............

[Cossack]

Hello members,

     I have 2 deep brood boxes and 2 suppers on my 5 hives. I have taken off the queen excluders so the bees will be able to access the stores of honey this winter. My question is......... Is this too early to do this?  I had lost half of my 14 hives this past winter. I am concerned that I will have another heavy loss.

.........Any advice you be helpful................   Thanks.

[Kathyp]

i don't think it's to early.  if they need to eat, they need to eat.  i am curious about what you have done.  a couple of ? just to satisfy my curiosity.

why did you use an excluder if you were leaving the supers on?  excluders don't keep bees from accessing stores, so you are talking about allowing the cluster to move up into the supers in winter?

some years there are big losses.  you can do everything right and have it happen, or sometimes you just miss one little thing and lose them. 

[Cossack]

I had planned on harvesting the suppers but became worried about my winter loss. I decided to give the suppers to them. On a few of the hives last winter the bees appeared to have starved trying to migrate up into the suppers. They were all clustered between the brood box/queen excluder/supper. I just wanted them to be able to survive the winter.

I just dont want the queen to start laying in the suppers.....

[Kathyp]

thanks.  no, you don't want to leave the excluder between the bees and the food over winter.  the cluster won't go where the queen can't, so the didn't move up.  if you leave honey supers on, you run the risk of the queen laying in them at some point.  it really doesn't matter.  the brood will hatch out and the supers will be fine to use.  it only matters for cut comb, but you do new comb for that each year anyway.

if she lays in the honey supers we can help you with that in the spring.

[AllenF]

Check your 2 deep boxes on each hive and see how much food they have stored up.   They will winter in 2 deep.  If they are light in food then you can give the honey back to them.  If you leave the supers on top without excluders, They queen will move up with the winter cluster as they eat up.   You can put a honey super on bottom of the 2 deeps and they will move honey up into the deeps.   They always store honey over brood.  But you need to check your deeps to see what they have.

[L Daxon]

Allen,
I have a 3 deep medium brood chamber and the bottom box is nearly all honey and pollen.  Brood is in the top 2 boxes.  Actually, when I was in last week to take the honey super off, there were several frames of nearly solid brood almost to the top of the frames (prettiest laying I had seen all season)  in the top brood box with hardly any honey above it.  Should I move the bottom brood box  which is really mostly hone to the top for the winter or just let them move the honey/pollen up?  I am putting on a slatted bottom board this weekend which I heard would help the queen lay to the bottom of the brood box (but that is really for next season).  Right now they just need the space--pretty crowded.

[AllenF]

Put the brood on bottom, over the slatted bottom.   Then the honey boxes.  Feed them now to put on weight with honey in the bottom boxes.  Put the empties on top or take them off to keep SHB at bay.  Move frames around if you want to to fill boxes. 

[tecumseh]

cossack writes:
I had lost half of my 14 hives this past winter. I am concerned that I will have another heavy loss.

tecumseh:
do you know or could you speculate as to what created this fifty percent loss?

by your second statement I take it you left the queen excluder on last year?  to correct a prior error in how things work the workers will go right thru a queen excluder to access food.  the problem being that the queen cannot follow and she typically dies of exposure on the bottom side of the excluder.  the hive then expires in the late winter/early spring due to no queen and nothing to make another queen from.

as far as stores I would make certain that the bottom deep has something in it besides empty comb.  one of the real problem with hives stacked too tall is a lot of folks (sometimes me included) assume the bottom box is occupied when it fact it is empty. 

[L Daxon]

Allen,

Am I understanding the strategy correctly?

I want the brood in the bottom of the 3 chambers going into late fall/winter  (most of it now is in the top box) with most of the honey/pollen stores up top.  This assumes the queen /cluster will move up over the winter months (where it is warmer) and into the food stores so they won't starve.  Is that the goal?  If that is the way things work, I can see whey leaving a queen excluder on could have caused cossack's losses.

(sorry, cossack.  I don't mean to hijack your thread here.)

[AllenF]

Bingo.   :)