A beekeeper’s winter worries

Winter is my least favorite time to be a beekeeper.  Don’t get me wrong.  There is much to love about the lull that cold weather brings, the chance to catch ones breath, reflect on the year past and attend to planning and preparation for next year’s honey and garden season.  But during the winter I miss working the bees, and I worry about them.  I spent 8 months of the year carefully tending to the bees, helping them to thrive, and doing everything I could to help them prepare for winter.  Now, for the next few months, pretty much all I can do for them is hold my breath and hope that I will see them still healthy and vital when the weather starts to warm in the spring.  And the next few weeks will really test my bees! 

When you think about honey bees in the winter, they are actually pretty amazing.  From the first flowers of spring, a honey bee colony is preparing for the next winter.  Pollen provides the food that allows them to raise a large population of worker bees that support the hive through the spring and summer.   Nectar is collected by those worker bees, stored and dried down into honey that will sustain them through the next cold winter once the last fall flowers have finished blooming.  And in good years, I am able to share in the wealth of their work by collecting some of their liquid gold honey to share with you.  As cold weather sets in, the bees stop foraging (looking for pollen and nectar), stop raising new babies, and form themselves into a tight mass of bees, known as a cluster.   The queen, the vital heart of a honeybee  colony, is protected inside.   The bees feed on the stored honey in the hive, and use the energy it provides to vibrate their wing muscles to generate heat.   This keeps the cluster warm, as warm as 95 degrees in the center.  If a colony is healthy, large enough and has enough honey stored where they can reach it, they can stay warm despite frigid weather outside.  Sometime in January, while winter is still going strong, the queen starts to lay eggs for the first of the next generation of worker bees, who will carry the colony into the next spring, when they will start their next cycle of honey collection to sustain them through the following winter.

As you can imagine, colony survival, particularly survival through the winter, is not guaranteed.  Historically we are told that about 10% of managed honey bee colonies died each year.  However, for way longer than I have been a beekeeper (which is almost 9 years now), annual losses have been much higher than that.  The Bee Informed Partnership conducts an annual national survey of colony loss and has for the past 10 years.   They estimate that they have data from about 10% of maintained honeybee colonies.  In 2019-2020, among those responding to their survey, annual colony losses were in excess of 40%, and annual losses have hovered at around 40% for many years now.  That means unless I beat the odds, I will lose 4 out of every 10 colonies I care for. That is pretty daunting. Knowing that winter is the most common time that colonies fail, I can’t help worrying about my bees.

I bet you are wondering why honey bee colonies are dying?  There is still much we don’t know but we have some good ideas.  The first recognition that colony death was a large scale problem appeared with the description of a form of colony loss known as Colony Collapse Disorder, in 2006.  We now understand that our high losses likely have many contributing factors, and those factors are affecting not only honey bees but also native bees, and other pollinators.  They include loss of good habitat to forage.  Forests and fields of wildflowers (what many refer to as weeds) are being replaced by lawns, crops, buildings, roads and parking lots.  There is also no question that the pesticides and other chemical we introduce to our environment have negative impact on bees and other pollinators, as does our changing climate.  And finally, bees are susceptible to a number of bacterial, viral and fungal diseases, as well as injured by pests that live with them in the hive, most notably a mite known as varroa destructor.  In our global economy, for all the many benefits it provides us, as people and goods travel the world, these diseases and pests spread around the world with them.  

Honey bees are far from alone in finding it more difficult to survive, but it is honey bees that have caught the world’s eye and drawn attention to the threat to pollinators.  And pollinators are vital to pollinating many of our crops and sustaining our food system.  So maybe we should think of honey bees as our “canary in the coal mine”, whose death is signaling to us that something is wrong, and we need to change what we are doing! I certainly think so!   And what will benefit bees can also benefit other insects and animals, including us.  So let’s help the bees!   Let’s plant more diverse plant habitats and less lawn, and allow wild flowers to grow along our roadways and unused open spaces in place of mowed grass, thereby providing food for pollinators and shelter and food for many other life forms.   Let’s reduce or discontinue use of chemicals on our lawns, gardens, and fields whenever possible, reducing the damage that those chemical are doing to our environment, including bees.  (Did you know that if you plant Dutch white clover in your lawn, it can fix nitrogen and help your grass thrive without synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, will grow at about the same speed as your grass so won’t require extra cutting, handles cutting well, and will blanket your summer lawn with flowers that the bees love. But it won’t survive if you treat your grass with herbicides.  But who wants that herbicide anyway.  It just takes a change in perspective. The most memorable and beautiful lawns in my mind are those blanketed in flowering scilla, spring beauties and violets in the spring, and white clover in the summer.)  Finally, let’s embrace changes that may help us slow global warming and climate change.   Then maybe my bees and all bees will have a better chance of surviving, and so will we.