Getting Ready for Winter

This past week has been about visiting all four of the hives that are still going and getting them set for the Winter. Not that Winter poses a big issue for the bees in the Bay Area, but still with much rain projected this year we want to make sure that the hives are set.

A few days back I visited the Dolores Park location to check the two hives there. One hive still had a lot of activity in both hive bodies, and brood and supplies in each. I took the super off the hive and set it aside for extraction -- about four full frames of honey there. The top hive body still has plenty of honey for the bees to use. They will have both hive bodies for the winter, but they seem to have a large population so it won't be an issue for them to heat.

The second hive had not been opened for a long time, though we took a super full of honey off it a couple of weeks ago. When I started pulling frames out of the upper hive body I realized that the entire upper body was all honey, no brood, no pollen.
The lower body contained a little brood and some eggs (meaning the queen is still present and healthy) and a lot of honey with some pollen. Clearly this hive has backed off on brood rearing in preparation for the Winter. I went ahead and took the hive body full of honey off and left just the one hive body for the bees. Less space for them to keep warm, but still plenty of supplies.

Rescuing honey!
On Saturday, we both went to our friend's to check the other two hives. These are both now very busy hives. Both hives had brood and supplies in both hive bodies, and the hive that had started out so slow actually had a super full of honey! The other stronger hive had a super full of capped honey, and one that just had a few frames of nectar not yet cured. We removed all the supers but left both hive bodies on each hive. We added entrance reducers to all the hives to aid in keeping down drafts and minimizing the need for them to dedicate guard bees when they need all the bodies they can get to keep warm.

We will extract all the honey in the supers and the one full hive body (another 80 lbs maybe?) The one super that has only nectar will be stored and returned to the bees in the Spring. They won't have to heat the space over the Winter, but they will have the supplies as a head start in the Spring.
A quick dusting of powdered sugar in all the remaining supers to keep the mites under control and we closed everyone back up. We'll come back to them in February or March, when the rains start to let up to check on how they fared.

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