From Honey Harvest to Winter Prep

It still feels very much like summer outside, but in the bee yard, I’m already starting to think about winter. I often find myself thinking months ahead of where I actually am, and I have to remind myself to enjoy the season I’m in. Right now, we’re eating the last of the sweet corn and enjoying lots of BLTs with fresh tomatoes, but my mind is already moving toward fall.

We’ve harvested what honey makes sense for us to harvest this year, and from here on out, the focus shifts back to the bees. Now is the time to give them plenty of opportunity to build up their own honey stores for winter. The last flowers in the prairie are starting to show themselves—goldenrod, asters, and other late-season blooms that give the bees some really important pollen and nectar before everything starts winding down.

Our high tunnel also happens to be full of buckwheat right now, and it’s just starting to flower. I use buckwheat as a summer cover crop because we grow in that space all winter and spring, but the bees get something out of it too. The flowers provide both pollen and nectar, and buckwheat honey is much darker and richer than the light summer honey we bottle. It has kind of a wheaty-molasses flavor that I personally don’t love, so I’m perfectly happy to let the bees keep that one for themselves.

Once that last honey super comes off, one of the next priorities is treating for varroa mites. Varroa are tiny parasitic mites that live in the hive and reproduce with the brood. Nearly every managed honey bee colony has to deal with them, and if the mite population gets too high, they can weaken the colony, cause problems with developing bees, and spread viruses. Leaving them unchecked can be a death sentence for a hive, so keeping those numbers down is a really important part of getting ready for winter.

Late summer is an especially important time to deal with mites because the bees being raised now are the bees I need to carry the hive through fall and winter. As we move later into the year, the queen will slow down her egg laying, and eventually there just aren’t as many new bees being produced to replace the ones we lose. I want the bees going into winter to be as healthy and strong as possible.

So while I’m finishing up the last of the bottling, I’m also shifting gears in the bee yard—checking colony strength, watching food stores, treating for mites, and making sure each hive has what it needs going into fall.

There are still plenty of warm days ahead, and the bees will keep working whatever is blooming. But from this point forward, the honey they collect belongs to them. I’ll keep checking the weight of the hives every couple of weeks, and if I’m concerned they aren’t putting away enough, I’ll start supplementing with 2:1 syrup.

It feels a little strange to be talking about winter while it’s still hot enough that I’m planning farm work around the afternoon heat, but that’s farming. I'm almost always in one season while already thinking about the next!