Stow aways!

For me, preparing hives for winter means putting insulation on the top, wrapping the hives with a relatively modest insulation, and adding mouse guards to the entrances.  The mouse guards are needed because, believe it or not, mice love to cohabitate with bees during the winter.  They seem willing to risk the possibility of being stung to take advantage of a dry protected space, and a ready supply of food, in the form of honey and dead bees, not to mention that living inside a hive also allows them to take advantage of “bee heating”.  During the winter cold, bees bunch together in a mass known as a cluster, and using honey as fuel, they vibrate their flight muscles to generate heat.   This time of year bees will keep the center of that cluster at around 70 degrees, but when they start raising baby bees in January or February, they will heat the center to 95 degrees.  Although mice don’t get to share in the toasty heat in the center of the cluster, bee heat undoubtably makes it warmer for them inside of beehives.  

This fall, while prepping hives for winter, I found that one of my hives was a dead-out, a word beekeepers use to refer to a hive in which all the bees have died.  No matter how hard we try, it is a sad reality of beekeeping that we will lose some of our bee colonies.  Wanting to press ahead with my winter hive preparations, I left the dead-out as it was, planning to return to break it down for storage the next day.  It still contained plenty of honey and nectar that I might be able to use to feed other hives in the spring.  Of course, being me, I promptly forgot it for a few weeks.  Finally, this week I took advantage of a relatively warm day to pull a wagon over to the neighbor’s yard and bring it home.  Bees make a sticky stuff called propolis that they use to seal up any cracks in the hive. Propolis acts as a natural glue that holds the hive boxes together.  Having neglected to bring a hive tool to help break the boxes apart, I loaded the hive onto the wagon more or less intact.  The bees had done such a great job gluing that the propolis kept the hive boxes neatly stacked over the half mile, bumpy ride back to the barn. 

As I disassembled the hive in the tractor shed, I noted, without much surprise, that there was a mouse nest at the bottom.  Despite lacking bees for bee heating, it still had most of the key components that make hives appealing to mice… a dry protected space, and a ready supply of food, in the form of honey and dead bees.  Assuming that any mouse who had been in residence would have taken advantage of the bumpy ride home to make its escape, I started pulling the last of the frames from the box, preparing to dump out the fluffy bedding the mice had collected.  Much to my surprise, 6 mice erupted from the nest, and scampered away.  Stow-aways!  They had stuck with me for the whole trip, abandoning ship only when there was no hope of continuing to stay hidden! 

I snapped a couple of pictures, and I have to admit that they are awfully cute! For a moment, I considered feeling sorry for them.  After all, I had just up-ended their cozy little home.  But I had also just released them into the barn, a much larger dry, protected space which offered lots of places to rebuild their nest.  They were going to be just fine. It also occurred to me that I had inadvertently just added 6 more mice to the (already large) pool of mice living close enough to the house to be potential visitors. Living in a 100+ year old farmhouse, with a Michigan basement (if you haven’t seen one, it looks more like a cave then the basements you may know and love), visiting mice are a perpetually problem.  So, I took a minute to warn them that if they decided to visit the house, they won’t be treated so gently! I hope they listened!