How to Prepare Your Hives for Winter After your final honey harvest in late summer or early autumn, it’s time to get your hives ready for winter. That’s assuming you live in an area where winter means cold temperatures (continually below 4 degrees celcius). Remove your extracted honey supers and store them inside. A garage or basement is ideal. This way they stay out of the elements of winter. There’s a good chance that honey supers stored over the winter will become infested with wax moths. It happens. What a disheartening sight to discover the damage they can do to your newly built frames and foundation. You can prevent wax moth damage in stored honey supers by fumigating the supers with PDB (Paradichlorobenzene). For instructions on this and other non-chemical methods to prevent wax moths, see Chapter 15 of Beekeeping for Dummies, Second Edition. During your final inspection for the season, remove any burr comb and excess propolis from the frames and hive bodies. This will make it easier to manipulate hive components in the spring, and put far less stress on these parts when you attempt to pry loose the frames and hive parts for your first inspection in the spring. Wrap the hive in black tar paper or roofing felt (the kind used by roofers). Make sure that you don’t cover the entrance or any ventilation holes. The black tar paper absorbs heat from the winter sun, helps the colony better regulate temperatures during cold spells, and the covering protects the wood from the harsh weather. Here’s a tip….I put a double thickness of tar paper over the top of the hive. Placing a rock on top ensures that cold winds dont lift the tar paper off. This too will benefit the colony and protect your roof from the snow, ice and rain that can deteriorate the wood.
Posted on: Tue, 05 Nov 2013 14:33:20 +0000
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