All's well in both hives.

Last time I checked, I was a bit concerned because my fall feeding campaign had caused the queen in one hive to produce a lot of excess workers, but I needn't have worried.  Once the sugar water went away, I started seeing dead bees in front of the hive, proving that the colony was just as quick about deciding to slim their numbers back down so they didn't eat up their winter stores prematurely. 

I decided to feed the other hive after seeing that they were 10 pounds shy of my winter goal on October 3.  It wasn't entirely purposeful, but since that hive needed less extra honey, I let the sugar feeder run dry for a day or two between each feeding, and the boom/bust cycle seems to have prevented the queen from laying many extra eggs.  Some queens are simply more prone to increasing hive numbers when faced with lots of sugar water than others, so it's possible this queen is just smarter than the other one.  Either way, though, it seems like making fall feedings less continuous can't hurt. 

With 60 pounds of capped honey in the daughter hive, 51 pounds in the mother hive, and some still dehydrating in each, it looks like our bees are ready for winter.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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