THE BEE BOX
32
Almond Facts
NOVEMBER | DECEMBER 2016
The Bee Box
KAREN RENNICH
Winter is Coming
This is the time of year when the rubber hits the road for
commercial (and all) beekeepers. Everything you have
been doing all year to manage your honey bees leads up
to this point. Are the bees well fed? Do they have low
mite levels? Is the queen healthy and productive? Do
they have plenty of winter stores and is the equipment
allowing adequate ventilation? Many people don’t
realize that winter bees differ physiologically from
summer bees and have the capability to live for months
rather than weeks. They must have the resources to
cluster through the winter yet still live long enough to
feed the new generation of spring bees once that queen
starts laying. In a way, you can think of these winter
bees as a special team raised solely for the purpose of
keeping the queen alive and converting the winter stores
into food to raise their younger sisters. For beekeepers
not in the north, there still can be some clustering on
colder days and winter stores are still important as there
is usually not much as far as nectar or pollen stores out
on the landscape.
Out in the Field
Many of our commercial beekeepers’ head south to
overwinter or go into climate controlled sheds in the
north. This allows the bees to grow (in the south) or have
a milder winter (in the sheds) before moving into almonds
in January.
Our technical transfer teams have been making their
last round of colony health assessments in Oregon,
Washington, Idaho, North Dakota and Minnesota.
As I write this, we still have teams sampling in Texas,
California and Florida. It is critical for Varroa mite
levels to be low this time of year. If Varroa levels are still
elevated, emergency treatments must be applied if those
colonies hope to make it through the winter and into
almonds. We closely track these mite levels starting in
August. We were seeing low mite levels in September but
some teams have seen increased mite loads in October
compared to last year. We’re helping the beekeepers get
the colonies as healthy as possible and as prepared as
possible for movement into the orchards. The next time we
will see them, the almonds will be blooming.
Holding yard in CA. Here the
colonies are fed heavily as
there is no available forage.
Photo courtesy of the
Bee Informed Partnership
