Have you ever been pooped on by a honey bee? Walk past a beehive on a warm, winter day, following a long cold spell, and you probably will be! Bees will do everything they can to avoid pooping inside the hive, and they can hold it a LONG time. In the winter, when cold weather keeps them inside for long periods, honey bees take advantage of warmer, sunny days, to take cleansing flights. That is a very nice, polite way to say that they fly outside the hive to go poop! This weekend, after a long period of cold and snow in SE Michigan, as the sun came out and the temperature crept up above freezing, the bees came out to poop! With snow on the ground, it was easy to see the evidence of their activity! All those lovely yellow spots in the snow in front of the hive? Yup! Bee poop!
Gross, you say? Not to a beekeeper! Winter is the time when most honey colonies are lost, but cracking open a hive in the middle of a winter freeze to check on the bees is not a great idea. A fellow beekeeper tells me he puts his ear to the side of the hive, and listens for a buzz, but I have age related hearing loss and can’t hear the bees in a closed hive. Hearing aids don’t help because when you press them to the side of the hive, all you hear is feedback! So, during the winter, I don’t have much to do but worry and hope that the bees are doing ok! Because of that, I celebrated seeing bee poop in front of my hives this weekend. After all, dead bees can’t come outside to poop! And it may sound crazy, but on a cold snowy day, I feel the same about seeing dead bees in the snow in front of a hive. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t love seeing dead bees. But the sun on the snow seems to draw a few hopeful bees outside even when it is too cold for them to survive. And dead bees don’t leave bee hives, so dead bees in the snow also means live bees inside!
After the first warming days brought bee poop as encouraging evidence that I had some live bees, the temperatures got all the way up into the high 40s and low 50. With two beautiful, warm (ok, warm might be a relative term, but after -2 F last week, it seems an appropriate description), sunny days, the bees came out to enjoy more than just pooping. As happens every winter, some of the hives had no bees flying, telling me that their bee residents had not survived. I have been concerned about high losses due to a couple of days of extreme cold earlier in the winter, so I was pleased to see that most of the hives were still active. But, with no flower sources yet available, they are not out of the woods yet. March is a particularly high-risk time for honey bees, as it is possible for them to use up all of their winter honey stores before spring nectar becomes available. Nothing is more disheartening than losing bees to starvation just as winter is ending! To give the bees in my care a bit of extra reserve, I took advantage of the warm days to break down the hives that had not survived, and donate any remaining honeycomb to the surviving hives. Of course, that meant having to open hives full of live bees, who wasted no time telling me that they were not happy to see me, even though I came bearing gifts. Unfortunately, I had completely forgotten that one of my winter projects was going to be replacing the worn-out elastic at the bottom of my bee jacket. The bees were kind enough to remind me of that oversight by crawling up inside the jacket to sting me. (Next year I will have to be more careful about writing out my winter “bee-stuff-to-do” list.) And to add insult to injury, they also pooped all over me! Ungrateful bees!
