Late Winter/Early Spring Beekeeping

by Mike Shaughnessy

Mike Shaughnessy, a biology faculty at NSU, has graciously written a blog about beekeeping. Mike been keeping bees for over 15 years in both Oklahoma and North Dakota.  He sells beehives in the spring and honey year round.  Mike resides on a farm in Stilwell, Oklahoma where he raises bees, chickens, turkeys and children.

As springtime draws closer, honeybees within their hives are starting to become evermore active.  Throughout winter, the bees have been quiet.  They aren’t dormant or hibernating they are just quiet.  The interior of a winter hive is maintained at a continuous temperature of over 97˚F.  The bees are active, flexing their thoracic flight muscles continuously to generate heat – similar to shivering in mammals.  This activity is fueled by the honey that has been stored in the hive since summer.  But as the days get longer after the 21^st of December, the activity in the hive starts to shift from maintenance of the colony to growth and reproduction.

Nobody fully understands how the bees detect the lengthening daylight.  It is also not fully understood how these winter bees manage to live for so long.  The normal life cycle of a honeybee is only about 42 days after hatching.  The honeybee hatches from its cell after 21 days.  The first 20-24 days of its life, the honeybee remains in the hive performing duties such as cleaning the hive, removing dead bees and debris, receiving nectar/pollen from field bees, drying nectar to honey or attending the queen.  After this period, the honeybee leaves the hive and becomes a ‘field bee’, collecting nectar, pollen and water for the hive.  Field bees do not typically live for more than a few weeks and they can be identified by their very often tattered wings (life outside the hive is hard!)

However, in the fall, the last generations of bees to hatch are ‘winter bees’.  These bees maintain the hive over winter and live as long as 6 months in northern climates.  The mechanism for this longevity is not known.  But these bees are critical as they perform all of the hive duties and begin foraging once the days begin to get longer.  Perhaps the most important duty at this time is to stimulate the queen to begin laying eggs again.  There is only one queen bee in each hive and she represents the entire reproductive capacity of the hive.  She is the only bee that reproduces, and, for a time, it was thought that she ‘controlled’ the hive.  In truth, hive function is much more complicated.  The worker bees and the queen communicate through complex chemical signals and behaviors, each affecting the other.  In late winter as the days lengthen, worker bees begin to groom the queen and stimulate her to begin laying.  Once she begins laying eggs, the larvae that hatch from the eggs release chemicals that stimulate the workers to tend to them.  Worker bees must feed each developing larva continuously (https://www.honeybeesuite.com/the-first-11-days-of-a-worker-bees-life-egg-and-larva/).  The number of larvae though that can be tended to is limited by the number of worker bees in the colony.

Worker bees not only have to feed the larvae, but they have to cover them in the winter with their bodies in order to keep them warm.  And so, population growth in the colony is limited by the present size of the colony, especially in winter.  A colony of bees in the winter may have as few as 3000-5000 bees.  A full-strength spring/summer colony can have as many as 35,000 to 50,000 or more bees.  As it takes 21 days for larvae to hatch and become worker bees – growing a sufficient number of bees to make a honey crop takes time. 

It is estimated that each honeybee, over the course of its life, produces only 1/12^th of a teaspoon of honey.  This means that it takes the life work of 768 bees to make a single pound of honey.  In eastern Oklahoma, bees require a minimum of about 70lbs of honey to successfully overwinter.  In North Dakota, where winters are significantly harder and longer, honeybees can not overwinter on less than 120lbs of honey.  These weights require the life work of 53,762 and 92,163 bees respectively.  That is a lot of bees – and the beekeeper hasn’t collected any surplus honey yet!  So, to make a surplus to harvest, beekeepers must manage hives to produce as many bees as possible before the flowers begin to bloom in the spring

This is the management challenge for the beekeeper.  A beekeeper must manage hives in such a way that they produce sufficient numbers of bees to make a honey crop.  However, if the hive population increased too fast too early – the hive may exhaust its winter honey stores before the first bloom and then starve/freeze in a late spring cold spell. If the beekeeper is too conservative and the population does not build up quickly enough, the hive will miss the honey flow in the spring and not produce a surplus for the beekeeper.

In Oklahoma, the spring honey flow begins between early/mid-February and early March each year.  The first blooms include Bradford pears, Elm trees and Maple trees.  By mid-March, the spring nectar flow is well underway with the fruit trees (crabapple, peach, plum, etc.) all blooming.  By April, the black locust and the clovers bloom.  May brings the blackberries, elderberries, Catalpa and Honeysuckle into bloom and the season concludes in June with Vitex and Basswood, among others.  The beekeeper wants to start this period with hives at or near full strength.  Honeybees will build their population on the spring flow – but that will not produce honey to harvest.

In this way, beekeeping is tied closely to the patterns of the seasons.  Each season’s management is geared toward the coming season.  Honeybees and beekeepers must always be looking ahead, planning for what is expected and hoping for favorable cooperation with nature.