Winter can be brutal for honeybees, and it’s up to you to keep them warm and healthy. A few simple steps can make all the difference in their survival.
Honeybees are especially vulnerable during colder months, but your hive can thrive through winter with the right precautions. This guide covers practical ways to protect your bees and ensure they have enough food to last the season.
We chose these tips because they’re easy to implement and effective. We omitted overly complicated methods so you can focus on what works best to keep your bees safe and warm. Let’s dive in!
1. Move the Apiaries to a Warmer Spot
One of the easiest ways to help your bees keep the hive warm during winter is to select a sheltered location for your hives before winter. Look for an area with low foot traffic but plenty of sunlight on sunny days, avoiding late-season moves that can disrupt the bees.
2. Secure the Hives Against High Winds
If you live in an area with frequent winter storms, secure your hives against strong winds. Use stakes or weights specifically designed for beehives to tie or weigh down the hives so they won’t topple with gusts. It’s not likely your beehive will survive being knocked over in frigid weather, so make sure their home is secure.
3. Set Up a Windbreaker
Setting up windbreakers — physical barriers that will keep your apiaries from facing the brunt of cold winds — offers your bees several benefits. They’re another way to protect your hives from strong gusts that may tip them over. And while the buffers won’t generate any warmth, they will help the hives retain heat by shielding the boxes from freezing air currents.
When setting up a shield, it’s also a good idea to check over your hives for cracks and holes that may let in cold air and moisture. Seal these up to offer the hive the most protection.
4. Add Reducers and Remove Excluders
While on the subject of reducing the flow of cold air into the beehive, let’s discuss the hive entrance. During warmer months, you likely have a larger entrance for bees to enter and exit. In cold weather, you should add reducers to hive entrances. The bees won’t be leaving the hive as much, except for cleansing flights, so minimizing this opening will keep cold air (and pests like wasps and mice) out of the nest.
At the same time, remember to remove excluders you may have within the beehive unless the hive is large enough to store winter honey above the excluder, which allows the queen to move freely with her colony.
5. Ensure Good Ventilation
Drilling ventilation holes or propping up your hive cover by tilting it back or using shims will improve airflow for your bees. This may seem counterintuitive considering the freezing temperatures, but it’s essential for maintaining the health of your colony. Honeybees will have little interest in leaving the hive during cold weather, but proper ventilation should be balanced to avoid creating drafts.
6. Wrap Your Beehive
There is some debate about whether it’s a good idea to wrap your hive for the winter. Wrapping involves covering your hives with black roofing felt or another insulating material. On the one hand, the extra insulation will help your bees stay warmer by trapping heated air and offering another layer of protection from icy drafts.
However, if you don’t wrap your hives correctly, the wraps can easily trap excess moisture from snow and condensation — and as you know, too much moisture can spell disaster in freezing weather. While it’s ultimately up to you to decide whether a wrap is appropriate or safe, consider using breathable materials designed for hive wrapping to help mitigate moisture issues.
7. Reconfigure the Beehives
As the size of your colony is greatly reduced during the colder season, you should remove unused boxes from the hive. Doing so will keep your bees from wasting energy to keep unnecessary space heated.
For example, if you have top bars hives, you should ensure that the honey harvest is situated on one side of the hive. That way, the bees will move in one direction while consuming the honey stores, rather than splitting down the middle to go in different directions.
8. Combining small or weak beehives
Small beehives may not be able to survive winter, even if they’re populated with healthy bees. This is because small colonies simply can’t generate the heat necessary to stay warm all through winter.
If you’re facing this scenario, consider combining a weak hive with a stronger one or combining two smaller colonies into one hive. When combining beehives, you can either remove the weaker queen or let the colonies decide which is the healthy queen.
9. Supplement Food Stores
When your colony’s efforts throughout the year fall short, and they don’t have enough food to feed on in the winter months, you must provide emergency feeding to help them survive. In late fall, start with a sugar syrup.
When the colder weather moves in, switch to fondant, which you can buy or make yourself. You can also offer grease patties with the extra benefit of controlling varroa mites. Also, remember that if you provide food for your colony because they didn’t have enough honey, you must continue to do so through early spring or until they can leave the nest to find pollen and nectar.
10. Monitor, but Don’t Bother, the Hive
As tempting as it may be for beekeepers to constantly check in on their colony during winter, it’s best to mostly leave them alone. Remember that every time you open the beehive to look in, you’re exposing your honeybees to chilly temperatures and diminishing their hard work of keeping the hive toasty. However, this doesn’t mean you should ignore your colony through winter. Instead, check on the hive periodically, preferably when the weather is warmer.
Take this time to assess food stores, provide more food if the cluster needs it, clear dead bees from the hive entrance, make sure the box is secure against wind, and ensure there is no excessive condensation.
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Becky is a wildlife enthusiast and pet and livestock care expert with a diploma in canine nutrition. With over a decade of experience in animal welfare, Becky lends her expertise to Simple Family Preparedness through insightful info about pets, livestock, bee keeping, and the practicalities of homesteading.