John Berry on Wintering Down

By John Berry

As with all things related to beekeeping, there are many right ways to do things, but this is how I conduct my wintering down of beehives. It has worked for me and my family for over 60 years.

Over the summer I have the hives four full depth boxes high with an excluder above the second box. If they fill up, I normally then run them with just one honey super which, if you’re lucky, will be filled again and occasionally even once more.

Needs a mow? Probably, but that might be one of those jobs the bees will survive just fine without you doing this winter advises John Berry.

Pre-varroa, it would often be getting well into April or even early May before we got the last of the honey off, but these days I try and get the hives down to two high by early March at the latest to facilitate varroa treatment. Having only one honey super means you can shut down a lot more hives in a day.

There was a time when we were running a thousand hives per person. You had to work fast and work efficiently, but we didn’t have that pressure from varroa.

Having the hives with only one super also meant you could get through the apiary faster at a time of year when robbing is often prevalent. The hives also tend to store more honey in the second box whereas, when they were re-supered to four high, you would often end up with fairly full supers but nothing in the brood nest. This means you have to either feed a lot of sugar or drop down a lot of honey. I regularly do both when I have to, but what I am always aiming for is for them to have sufficient stores in the brood boxes to last them the winter and, most of the time, that is what happens.

Feeding sugar does have some benefits, especially if you want to stimulate late breeding, but it also can be a cause of robbing and no matter how careful you are often leads to the loss of the odd hive.

Dropping down frames of honey means that you have to take out frames that are probably full of pollen and the bees have put it there for a reason.

Feeding is obviously better than leaving hives to starve, but it does come at a cost. I like to leave the hives about 15kg, which is equal to about six heavy frames of honey. Just remember that pollen that is in the brood box is often covered in honey so you can’t really see it. I heft the hives to estimate the weight of honey. Pollen and brood weigh less than honey but, with experience, you can get pretty accurate estimates by using both visual and weight gauges.

You can leave them less than six frames of honey, but in my experience hives tend to dwindle down to the level that they think they can survive the winter, based on the amount of feed they have available. I would rather have them come through as strong as possible. These days they tend to come through weaker than they used to anyway, probably because of varroa.

If you do need to feed the hives I prefer to do this in April rather than March as the robbing seems to be less. Before varroa, if we were taking the last of the honey off and the hives had plenty of stores then that was it until the spring, even if it was in March that we were doing it. Nowadays I need to do a final visit to remove my varroa treatments and I like to do that as late as possible in April or, heaven forbid, early May. Remember that when working hives at this time of year if you accidentally kill the queen then the hives will not survive the winter.

Provided an apiary has no history of AFB this is the one time I don’t do a brood inspection, especially if it is cold and the bees are clustered. My hives will have already had an average of about 10 inspections that season and there will often be very little brood if any to check, plus I do not believe in breaking up the winter cluster.

I am only removing the strips at this stage, however, should I need to remove something from a hive or swap something between hives, I would still do a brood check. Any apiary with a history of AFB would also get one. 

If you leave it till the end of the season to remove your honey you make it very difficult to control varroa and also leave your hives open to attack from both robbing bees and wasps. The hives will be stronger, but you will also get less honey because they will have consumed quite a bit more to stay that way.

There are a lot of articles about how you should shut the hives down to the point where the bees cover everything, by perhaps removing the bottom brood box or even using follower boards. This may be beneficial in really cold countries, but I don’t think it’s necessary in New Zealand. As it gets cold the bees will cluster and they will only heat the bit they are using.

Trimming the grass back is probably a good idea, but for most of my beekeeping career we never had time. As I’ve said before, bees are remarkably adaptable creatures and often survive despite what we do rather than because of what we do. 

You have controlled the varroa. You have shut the hives down with enough feed. You have controlled wasps where necessary and maybe even cut the grass. 

Winter is upon you and winter is the time for doing all those maintenance jobs on the frames and boxes and doing a tidy up (I don’t think I’ve ever seen a beekeeper’s yard that didn’t need at least a little tidy). Go for a holiday, you probably need it. 

Winter is not the time to be bothering your bees. 

John Berry is a retired commercial beekeeper from the Hawke’s Bay, having obtained his first hive in 1966, before working for family business Arataki Honey and then as owner of Berry Bees. He now keeps “20-something” hives.