August 2025 in your Central Oregon Apiary
The summer is more than half over. We’ve been enjoying wonderful long warm evenings, AND not a lot of smoke. The rabbit brush and sagebrush in my area are blooming. Many of the bees are bringing in nice amounts of nectar. Great times to spend outdoors.
This month is the time to start focusing your bees away from summer and more toward Fall and Winter.
During the first half of the month you’ll want to maintain some empty space in the hive for a brood chamber in which the queen can lay. Mainly by keeping/adding supers with at least some drawn comb. If there isn’t enough space, the colony may become honeybound (symptoms are the bees are backfilling the brood chamber with nectar, and frequently the queen will slow down her laying). Then your colony could start prepping for a late season swarm. If they are honeybound you may want to add a super with at least some drawn comb, and additionally perhaps remove a few frames of honey from the hive body and replace with empty, preferably drawn comb in the middle of the brood chamber. If they have started swarm prep, I like to do an artificial swarm, then choose the queen you want from the two halves, pinching the other, and reunite the two colonies (or use one of the queens to requeen another colony).
I feel that the colonies start raising the winter bees in the second half of august and the queen slows down her laying, and the colony slows it's brood rearing (one school of thought is that the nurse bees have extra vitellogenin from not having as much brood, so feed more of it to the remaining brood, and voila, winter bees). So, I like to pull most of my supers by then, planning for the colonies to backfill into the brood chamber as it empties. If your colony is light, now’s the time to feed them again with 1:1 syrup.
Winter bees are what allow our colonies to start up again in the spring, and they need to be healthy to do this. MITES, are a big factor in their health. Now that you don’t have supers on, the menu of treatments opens up dramatically. If you’ve been keeping the mite numbers low (1% or less, perhaps using a less aggressive treatment (apiguard or apilife var or hopguard). If they have higher numbers, perhaps a more aggressive “knockdown” treatment (Formic acid or apivar). Please see the HBHC tools for varroa management for treatment decision trees, treatments and application methods.
If you have an older queen which is not as productive as she used to be or laying a poor pattern, think about requeening. There are still some suppliers available and you can coordinate and share shipping charges.
Enjoy this month of change.
Finally, please remember Naomi Price, who passed recently and touched many of us with her care, thoughtfulness, and knowledge. You can visit her remembrance page, where you’re encouraged to share memories and photos for us and for Larry and her family to enjoy. https://cobeekeeping.org/Naomi-Price
Happy beekeeping
Allen Engle
