Time to Put the Bees to Bed

 Hi everyone. Happy Sunday. I hope you are having a lovely weekend so far. My daughter came to visit Friday morning and left yesterday (Saturday). It was a fun visit, and she said she might even be coming for Thanksgiving. That would be nice if she does. 

Since it's November, it is time to wrap up many autumn chores. One of those chores is to close up my beehive for the winter. I'll explain more about that further down in the post, but first here's a bee themed page from my Bee Journal that I am linking up to Jo's Nature challenge at Art Journal Journey.

I used 2 shades of yellow watercolor paint to make my background. Then I used a scrap of printed paper to make the leaves and flowers. The clouds are stamped, and I used some white paint bobs on them, thinning the paint enough to keep the stamped design visible. I also stamped the sun and used yellow Stickles glitter glue. Finally I took some cheesecloth to make the ground. It is NOT supposed to be white for snow, just for texture.  Then I used some orange watercolor paint and splattered my page.

Don't you get a kick out of those little Victorian style bee stickers? I also used a scrabble tile. I picked the B for obvious reasons.

In the autumn I need to insulate the beehive against the cold. Short of adding a heater inside (which I have thought about), I'm trying to keep those occasional really cold winter days from killing my bees-again. Sadly the Canadian variety, which is supposedly excellent  in the kind of cold we get here in New Hampshire, arrived back in May mostly dead with not enough of the bees alive to keep the colony going. Now I am dealing with just my southern bees, and I am not holding out a lot of hope they will make it.  But I am not giving up on them either.

I've wrapped the hive using 2 bee insulated jackets on the outside, as you can see. The jackets are vinyl and filled with insulation. I also did some raking and bagged the leaves to insulate around the bottom. Actually a couple of the bags are from last year, and a few are from this year, and when I go out and rake more of my garden I will add a few more bags. The top hive box, which you can't see in the photos as it is covered by the bee blankets,  is a winter top with 6 inches of insulation. Sadly I'm not sure this is going to be enough to get them through the severe winter days however.

It's certainly not pretty, is it?

When I added these insulating bits last weekend, a lot of the bees came out to see what I was doing to their hive. And being curious creatures, they had to check it out. Before I kept bees I never thought of insects as being so interactive with their environment. 😏

Honey bees need to keep the inside of the hive quite warm year round. If they can't maintain the heat, then they can no longer flap their wings to create more heat. What I'm really trying to do is help insulate the hive to keep the heat that honey bees create  inside of the hive. If the inner hive temperature can stay warm, then the bees should make it through the winter.

The brown rectangles in this above photo are made with a substance called propelis, which is a sticky material the bees make. They bind it to everything, so if I go into the hive I actually need to pry pieces apart. I haven't gone deep into the hive since it's cooled off because the other thing the propelis does is seal up any cracks. I've wanted their cracks to be as sealed as possible for winter's cold.

The other interesting thing about bees in winter is that the young born in the fall are physiologically different from those born in the warmer weather. They can live longer and put up with the cold much better. Depending on your variety of bees, that determines  how much cold these winter bees can stand. 

I'm hoping to add one more wind breaking wrap that I'm still waiting for it to be delivered, and we still have a windbreak shelter to put up. 

I'm also linking up to Gillena's Sunday Smiles .

Enjoy whatever is left to your weekend or start of the new week.