Adding rhubarb strips to the hive was only of secondary importance when I delved into our apiary this week. My primary purpose was to make sure that the bees had socked away enough honey to make it through the winter.

Last month, the Langstroth hive was 25 pounds low, so I decided to feed them sugar water just in case the fall flowers weren't sufficient to make up the difference. But my brain went fuzzy and I mostly forgot to feed them --- I think I might have given them about ten pounds of sugar, all-told.

Luckily for me, the bees knew what to do. The Langstroth hive is now at about 43 pounds while the Warre hive has nearly the exact same amount (without supplemental feeding).

Or it did until I pulled out one frame of honey for  us that was all alone in an otherwise empty box. That's a major downside of the Warre hive --- it's tough to switch frames around to consolidate living quarters in winter, and this time I figured it was better to take a bit of extra honey rather than making the colony heat a largely useless box all winter long.

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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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