Fall is officially here, and so far it looks warm and dry. This can create some challenges in regards to keeping your colonies up to weight for winter and in preventing robbing. Some areas of Pennsylvania have no significant nectar source available now, and some areas of the state still have goldenrod and aster blooming. Most areas will slowly lose those last significant pollen and nectar sources, and colonies may start eating into their honey reserves.
- Continue to manage any small hive beetles. Be careful to not store full or wet honey supers if you have small hive beetles.
- You may want to put out some yellow jacket traps as their scavenging around your colonies may increase until the weather gets cold.
- Robbing may get worse this time of year and it is often an issue from other honeybee colonies or yellowjackets. This is dependent on how much nectar is available naturally as well as how many colonies are nearby. Strong colonies can usually handle it, if their entrance is reduced, but small colonies may benefit from either a very reduced entrance or robbing screen. I would also avoid any honeybee supplements that contain lemongrass, as this can attract robbing. If the weather continues to be warm over the next few weeks, we'll see more robbing.
- If your honeybee colonies are light on food, unless you have a nectar flow of some sort, you want may need to supplement small colonies. It is a mistake to leave them extremely low on food right now and think that you can catch them up in the fall. Lack of food causes the colony to retract and become stressed at a time they need to be maintaining or building bees for winter. This long, drawn-out warm fall can cause your colonies to eat back through their food reserves.
- Check your hive weights before it gets too late to do something about it. Here is a great table of sample weights that I've found to be a good guideline for much of Pennsylvania and southern New York.
- If you are having issues with your queens, first make sure the queen is actually gone. If there is no nutrition coming in, some queens will stop or significantly slow down laying. Another factor that can affect the brood pattern or a queen laying is the presence of viruses or high mite loads. Have you checked your mite levels? If you're actually queenless now, your best option often is to combine colonies (queenless colony above a queen right colony). You may still be able to find a queen for sale, but a colony that has gone queenless at that time of year may not be able to recover in time for winter. Becoming queenless may also indicate other potential issues with that colony.
- By now, your varroa mite levels should be under control if you wish your colonies to survive until spring.
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Our fall honey (knotweed with goldenrod and aster) should be ready at the end of October.
- We will have winter fondant (Hive Alive brand) available by November.
- Here are our current prices for supplies: https://walnutfarmbees.com/pages/current-pricelist