Hives in the snow

Winter is hitting hard. It has been snowing and sleeting all day. The bees, however, are tucked in and cozy, clustering in their boxes. It'll be a while before they get to come out to stretch their wings again.

Plans for 2026

 

As I enter my fourth year as a beekeeper, I'm looking to step up my game a bit in 2026.

The first step will be expanding my apiary. I started a new yard last year in Crimora, which is about an hour from my house. While the two colonies currently there seem to enjoy the space -- and there are loads of flowering trees and other plants for them -- I have struggled to get my electric fence to work properly. Too many rocks to drive the grounding rod in deep enough, I theorize. 

Also, it's a several-hour adventure to get out to Crimora and back, which means I can't do it as often as I'd like. So I may relocate those colonies to my home property and set up a new yard on another corner of our land where I can add more full-sized hives and maybe develop some nucs for sale in the future.

The second step will be trying a Demaree Split for the first time. I was going to try this maneuver in 2025, but chickened out. It's a bit complicated to set up, but will stop swarming in its tracks and provide a larger amount of honey than a hive can do normally. This fixes with my third step.

The third step is to increase honey production and sales this year. In 2025, the bees produced 135 pounds of honey and four pounds of wax out of three hives, more or less. One of my strongest hives (White) collapsed due to a run-away mite infestation and subsequent hive beetle invasion. I'm hoping to prevent a repeat of that while relying on another three to four colonies for honey. All told, I'm shooting for six or seven honey producing colonies in 2026, with the rest being splits and swarms that will grow into honey producers in 2027.

The fourth step will be to introduce new bee-derived products. I'm going to buy a couple pollen traps to add bee pollen to my market stall along with waxed fabric wraps for food and container coverings. In 2025, I experimented with making beard balms, which I liked but didn't sell, and lip balm, which I used and gave away, and candles. All include beeswax in their recipes.

I also made holiday gift boxes, which I sold quite a few of to my friends but failed to sell at the market. I think there's a chance to try those again this year, although I may have to work on finding the right market for the beard balm -- maybe the Archwood Green Barns market at The Plains. It's a haul, but honey sold well there last year.

But first, we have to make it through winter. So fingers crossed that our existing colonies come out the other side healthy and abundant and ready to harvest. Let's go, 2026!

Dead-out

One of my hives died recently. 

I don't know exactly when, but I suspect it happened during our recent cold snap when nighttime temperatures dropped to 10 degrees. 

Bees survive the cold by clustering in a tight ball and flexing their wing muscles to generate warmth. This colony was undersized going in to December, so I didn't have a lot of hope for them.

Colonies died over winter. It's something all beekeepers must plan for. Small colonies can be lifeboated by placing them atop another colony separated by a double screenboard to keep the two colonies from mixing pheremones, which could cause one queen to try to kill the other.

I considered lifeboating this one, but its likely partner was fairly small itself and I worried about being able to tend them both if they needed additional resources.

The dead-out solved that problem. The unused resources from the dead hive, including multiple frames of capped honey, went to the White hive, inproving its chances of survival.

Waiting for Spring

It's that time of year when the bees hunker down and wait for spring. I'm right there with them.

Until I became a beekeeper, I never really thought about what bees did in the winter. I guess I assumed they died out or went underground.

The fact is that they huddle together like penguins in Antarctica flexing their wing muscles to generate the heat needed to keep the colony alive. These bees can live up to six months and have more body fat that their summer sisters.

The winter crew lives off of the honey stored by the summer workforce, moving upward through the stores as the winter progresses. If all goes well, they will have exhausted their reserves about the time the first blossoms appear in the spring.

To give them a little nutritive cushion, I will add candyboards -- blocks of hard sugar -- to the hives between now and March. That will help the smaller colonies make it all the way to spring, hopefully.

Black Walnuts, Yum

Every fall, the half-dozen or so black walnut trees on our property pepper the yard with their billiard ball-sized progeny. After nearly twisting my ankle stepping on them repeatedly the first year we lived here, I vowed to do something with them to make the trees earn their keep.

I asked for a nut roller for Christmas, and the next year I started collecting black walnuts. The meat of black walnuts is loaded with beneficial compounds, which is benefit number one of black walnuts. 

Black walnuts make you earn those benefits, however. 

First there's the green (or black as it breaks down) outer hull to get through. This is guaranteed to stain your hands and clothing if you're not careful -- so wear gloves and maybe an apron. Definitely do not wear your Sunday best for this job.

I process my walnuts in a trashcan with some water and a paint/cement mixer to churn the nuts against each other to break down the outer part. Any hull-free nuts that float are duds -- minimal meat, mostly air pockets. Get rid of them.

The jet black liquid you get from processing the walnuts can be used to make a dye for natural fabrics. The result is a lovely light brown color. So, that's benefit number two of black walnuts.

After they dry in the sun for a while, I bag them up in a burlap sack so they continue to get air as they cure. In the shell, black walnuts will last for months to years. I'm just now processing the nuts I bagged up two years ago, and they're about 50/50 good vs duds that have gone bad over time. So maybe a smaller interval between harvest and finishing is better....

Before I get cracking, I soak my walnuts in water overnight -- a trick I learned from Feral Foraging on YouTube. I don't follow his entire formula, but the soaking definitely makes cracking these tough nuts considerably easier. Without the bath, they're much more likely to explode like a hand grenade when pressed.

It's tedious, time-consuming work. It's also mindless, which allows me to catch up on a Netflix show or listen to a podcast as I work my way through a mound of nuts. So far, I've produced about three quarts of nut meats, which I packaged for sale at our last farmers market. 

Sadly, I got no takers, but I love black walnuts and I'm sure plenty of other people out there do as well. They just don't know it yet.

Just for good measure, here's a bunch of recipes using black walnuts.

Late swarm

The other morning, Jen woke me with the magic words: "There's a swarm in the apple tree."

There *was* an swarm in the apple tree. It was a small swarm and, since the apple tree is also small, I was about to reach the swarm easily and collect it. 

This was the fourth or fifth swarm I have caught on my property this year. Only one turned up in my swarm traps and stuck around before this one. Unfortunately, that one has gone queenless and been merged with the old White hive that collapsed due to mites and hive beetles.

For this hive, I scooped them into a bucket, then collected the stragglers with my bee vacuum.

After that, they went into a five-frame nuc box that I had on hand from after bringing my friend Jodi's bees to my house a few weeks earlier. (Jodi's newly developed allergy precludes her from keep her bees at the moment.)

They're small, which means I'll have to feed them lots of sugar water to try to boost their population ahead of winter. They'll need as much nectar/sugar as possible to make it through to March or April. Fingers crossed.

Update 12/18: I eventually merged the swarm with the remains of one of the Crimora colonies that went queenless. They are thriving.

New Bee Yard is Open

I kicked off my new bee yard at Black Bear Composting in Crimora last week. The yard is positioned in a large field ringed by black cherry, black locust, and fall bloomers like wingstem. The field is also loaded with asters, clover, and other small flowers in addition to grass that gets mowed a couple times a year for hay. I'm very curious to see what the spring bloom is like out here.

The hives are two of five that I am fostering for Jodi Kitchens, a friend who developed an allergy and had to stop tending her bees several month ago. Next year, I'll use the yard to handle the overflow from my home apiary, which has room for 10 hives. I should have space in the new apiary for 6 to 8 hives.

Because they had been untouched for so long, they were a bit spicy when opened for inspections. The bigger of the two has is very strong, which means it is also packed with honey -- not always a good thing. I pulled some honey to give to Jodi and left the bees some empty frames to build out and fill when the fall bloom begins in earnest.

I also found the queen of the smaller hive! It's always exciting to find a queen. She was too quick for me to catch and mark, but I'll try again on Sunday when I revisit the yard to test for mites and make some other fixes (like giving the small hive (J5)) an inner cover. The small hive was expanded from three five-frame nuc's, so they're enjoying the opportunity to spread out a bit. I did shrink them down to two boxes just to keep them from having more space than they can defend from invaders.

I also witnessed something I've never seen before -- a nurse bee feeding a new bee as they struggled to emerge from her cell following pupation. I love to see new bees emerge and have seen many do so, but this was a first. Pretty cool.