Month by month 09: September

September often appears as a second, short spring 
 
This saying reminds us that after the heat and drought of the two preceding months, the return of rain—while sunshine remains abundant and warm—allows vegetation to resume growth. Flowers are present, and foraging bees bring in nectar and pollen. In recent years, this “spring” has extended into October.

Feeding

In principle, earlier feeding measures are sufficient. Colonies will be inspected and reduced in volume by removing empty or insufficiently filled frames. A partition limits the bees’ living space and retains heat during winter. This may be a wooden board hung like a frame and flush with the hive walls and the inner cover; it can also be a dense extruded polystyrene or polyurethane board, preferably lined with a reflective aluminium sheet. Other products also exist, particularly for making hive covers that are both insulating and permeable to hive moisture, such as Phaltex (bituminised wood fibre).

It is important that frames are as full as possible so that the cluster has access to a large surface of honey if prolonged cold forces it to remain in one area of the hive. Empty frames should be removed. During a warm spell, if honey becomes scarce where the cluster is located, it will migrate to the other side of the hive where honey is still available. This observation leads to the conclusion that the larger the colony, the greater the cluster’s ability to spread over several frames and easily remain in contact with honey reserves. Colonies that are too small run major risks in this respect. Colonies sometimes starve even though frames containing honey are present at the other end of the hive.

Until mid-month, concentrated syrup can be provided continuously using a full feeder (since harvest, about 20 litres of syrup with 70% sugar) to fine-tune winter reserves. After 15 September, only small amounts of light syrup (at most 50/50) should be given to stimulate the queen’s egg laying and populate the colony with many young bees. However, by the end of the month it is imperative to stop all feeding in order to leave newly emerged bees without activity, allowing their high pollen intake to enrich them in fat bodies, which ensures good nursing capacity during winter when the queen resumes laying in January/February. Ideally, by the end of August the brood boxes should be filled with honey combs well stocked over their entire height; insufficiently filled combs are removed and space for the queen to lay is restored. If necessary, a side frame is removed and an empty drawn comb is placed in the centre. The objective is to have many young, healthy bees by the end of October.

For those who have placed their hives on fir trees, honeydew contains mineral salts that are toxic to bees; brood frames must be removed and feeding carried out to provide bees with adequate winter stores. Honeydew flows result in high mortality because they force beekeepers to overwinter bees that have aged due to late feeding. A countermeasure is to stimulate brood production as late as possible through protein feeding with light syrup, maintaining brood until December.

Requeening

This is the time to carry out queen replacement in order to equip colonies with queens of the current year. The age of the queen is the primary parameter for high production. Colonies are requeened either by introducing young queens in cages into colonies that have been previously dequeened, or by uniting production colonies with artificial or natural swarms equipped with queens of the year. I prefer the latter solution, as it reduces the risk of supersedure in the following month. A few principles must be respected:

• Be certain of the quality of the young queen; it is pointless to replace a good laying queen with a poor young one.
• Only unite healthy and dynamic colonies; two men of one and a half metres have never made a man of three metres. In other words, two weak colonies will produce another weak colony.
• In case of doubt or lack of time, it is always possible to overwinter colonies or nuclei on five well-filled honey frames. Winter generally proceeds well, and uniting in March is often a good option for the survivors.
• The spring start of nuclei or colonies overwintered on five frames will be explosive due to management that stimulates new comb construction through speculative feeding. New nuclei can then be produced very quickly.

Uniting two colonies = two solutions:

1. By mixing populations in one hive: Place all brood frames of the nucleus, with their bees and the queen, in the centre of a hive. On each side, add the brood frames with all their bees from the production colony. Finish with all pollen and honey frames. All populations are sprayed with scented water. It is preferable to destroy the old queen. This method protects the young queen against attacks by other bees. If the queen of the colony to be requeened cannot be found, there is some chance that the nucleus queen will be better protected than the other. However, nothing is absolute in this matter, and destroying the queen to be replaced remains the only reliable method.
2. Using a Nicot uniting grid by superimposing hives
   - Place a uniting grid on the hive whose queen is to be retained.
   - Place the hive body to be united on top.
   - Five to eight days later, remove the grid, shake the bees behind the hives, locate and destroy the old queen, and recompose the hives with brood and honey/pollen frames.