Midwinter Bee Maintenance

I maintain my one top-bar hive "au natural", meaning that I don't spray for mites or fungus, and I don't give them antibiotics or take their honey away and feed them sugar water throughout the winter. This is my first winter with bees, so the learning curve is pretty steep, but we're getting there.

During the super cold snap we had in December (where it got into single digits overnight and rarely jumped above 25 during the day) I wrapped the hive with some tarping to trap a little more heat for the girls, and I used an entrance reducer to keep in more of their heat. Well, since then I've left both of those winterization bits in place, but the weather has warmed up significantly, to the point where it's been over 50 in the daytime and we haven't had a frost since that cold snap. (Seriously, an entire month with no frost. Weird weather patterns. But that'll be the next post.)

Went out to check on the girls last week, and noticed that not only were the bees out foraging, they were bringing back saddlebags full of yellow pollen from somewhere. I haven't seen a single blooming flower around here, not even my pieris or hellebore is blooming, but the bees are better at finding food than I am at spotting flowers. My guess is perhaps they found a nearby house or houses with primroses or pansies, but maybe there's something else blooming. At any rate, they seemed pretty vigorous.

Went back out yesterday to check on them, and noticed that the front of the hive was smeared with streaks of something. As I contemplated it, I realized what it was: bee poo. The girls have a mild case of dysentery (no, not the human kind, just the bee kind.) Oh dear.

Dysentery in bees isn't all that uncommon in the winter, and it isn't usually fatal by itself. In extreme cases, the bees get so weakened they fall prey to other diseases or parasites and the hive dies, or they get so much waste material piled up in the hive that they have a hard time cleaning it. It is often caused by Nosema, a single-celled, gut-invading organism. Hives can survive a Nosema outbreak if they're otherwise healthy and strong, but it can be treated with antibiotics as well.

Dysentery can also be caused by the simple conditions of winter weather for bees. If they are feeding on honey with a high proportion of non-digestible material, their guts become laden with waste matter. Usually they take care of that with a "voiding flight", where they fly out and do their business away from the hive. If the weather is below 50 for an extended period, or extremely rainy and windy as it was the past week or so for us, they can't get out for that voiding flight, and eventually they end up having to void in the hive, or just outside on the front of the hive. Given that my hive's case seems pretty mild so far, I suspect that's the problem, rather than a major Nosema infestation, though things can change quickly so I'll just have to keep an eye on it. Apparently hive conditions can also cause issues, especially lack of ventilation and moisture buildup. I noticed a few weeks ago that they were having condensation issues on the inside of the viewing window, so I know the ventilation is pretty low.

Turns out, one of the reasons commercial beekeepers feed their hives sugar water in the winter is to help prevent dysentery. Sugar water, though almost completely lacking in nutritional value, also has almost no non-digestible matter. Bees eating sugar water don't build up waste matter in their guts, and therefore don't have to void inside or outside the hive. I think that's probably penny-wise and pound-foolish, though. Imagine if you were on a "clear liquid" diet where all you were allowed to injest was lemon-lime soda or energy drinks. Sure, you'd have energy, you'd probably continue to function, but you wouldn't be getting any nutrition. Your muscles would atrophy from lack of protein, you would start to suffer from lack of vitamins and trace minerals, and your immune system would be damped down. Similar situation with the bees; honey is a complex food full of enzymes and nutrients, whereas processed sugar isn't. They still have energy, they are getting calories to sustain themselves, but they're not getting actual food. I can't imagine bees would have evolved over millions of years to not be able to digest their own winter food, so I am going to continue to let them eat it and deal with the bathroom breaks as they can.

Jacqueline Freeman, who lives at Friendly Haven Rise Farm and teaches holistic beekeeping classes, also recommended that I give them a weak tea made of nettles, horsetail, and/or chamomile plus some of their own honey and offer it back to them in a dish with moss on top (to prevent drowning). Between that and removing the rain tarp and opening up the entrance reducer to increase ventilation, hopefully I can stop the problem before it gets worse.

How Not To Grow Tomatoes

My tomatoes did horribly this year. I know why, so I thought I'd share!

For one thing, I planted them far too late into the season, due to a variety of factors including a late start on the seedlings and a late start getting the raised beds done, coupled with the fear of starting them too early. As it was, they wound up 2-3 weeks too late into the season, or about the end of June. They should really have been in ground by the beginning of June, covered with a light row cover if necessary to prevent frost damage.

Due to what I suspect is way too much nitrogen in the soil (heavy compost load in the soil), the plants got GINORMOUS, and as a result they crowded against one another, broke their tomato cages and in some cases literally snapped the stakes in half, and fell over. I planted them quite far apart, and in fact my husband teased me about how much room I left between them. Or he did, until they started to get big. But the upshot is, they got too big and both undid themselves with their own weight and crowded out all possibility of light and air getting to the inner parts of the plants. No ventilation = bad juju.

And then there was the overhead watering. Due to the speed with which we had to get the plants in the soil this year, we ended up not being able to install the drip irrigation system we normally use. Instead, we installed a "spic spic spic whirrrrr" type sprayer at the center of the garden and let it water everything. Overhead watering is NOT usually a good thing for gardens, and it really proved true this year. I wound up with foliar problems I've not faced in the past, and between that and the lack of ventilation under the tomatoes, they stayed rather damp.

And finally, when the tomatoes were finally setting on and just thinking about ripening, we had a couple of weeks of cool, dampish weather and rain. Boom, late blight. Now from my research I've been doing, it looks like late blight is not common in our area and is usually found in the Northeast, but I'm almost entirely certain that's what's wrong with the tomatoes. They got yellowed and spotty on the leaves, and the tomatoes themselves developed brown leathery areas near the top of the stems. We ended up with only a few pounds of ripe, edible tomatoes from 42+ plants, and a few pounds more of edible green tomatoes. Rather ridiculous.

On the up side, it turns out that late blight doesn't typically overwinter in the soil, so if I pull all the plants out and get rid of the blighted plants in the garbage, it shouldn't recur next year. I will be sure to plant the tomatoes in another part of the vegetable bed as well, just in case. Though the spores are wind-blown and would travel easily to another part of the garden, the largest concentration should be in the soil at the base of the currently affected plants, so by moving to another bed I should hopefully avoid the worst potential for contamination.

To Sum Up...

* Plant tomatoes with LOTS of space between them, to insure adequate air flow and ventilation.
* Plant early enough to leave them time to ripen in the heat of the summer sun, so they're not trying to ripen in the cool, wet fall weather. This may mean using Wall O Water or some row covers to lengthen your growing season in spring.
* Nix the overhead watering. Drip systems win.
* Don't overdo the nitrogen fertilizer, or the nitrogen-rich compost.
* Pull up and destroy blighted plants as soon as blight appears. Do not compost blighted plants. Blight can cross to potatoes, eggplants, solanacious weeds (like nightshade) and petunias, so watch those plants as well.
* Don't plant tomatoes in the same spot where diseased or pest-laden tomatoes, potatoes, or eggplants grew the previous year.