Fall came this morning. The skies dawned a brilliant blue, colorful leaves rained to the ground in the light breeze and the 50 degree temperature was perfect for enjoying my coffee on the deck. We deserved this day. A good portion of the Southeast has suffered from torrential flooding over the past 10 days. I have recorded almost 2' here. Rain fell heavily all day yesterday. There has been extensive damage to roads, bridges, dams and livelihoods. The flooding took a heavy toll on the apple crops in this area. Great piles of fruit just fell to the ground. In Atlanta, there was a devastating loss of 7 beehives at The Blue Heron Preserve. I feel very fortunate not have suffered any losses.
The garden washed pretty badly, but that is easily fixed. The bird population dines heavily on the heads of sunflowers, coneflowers and joe-pye weed. I usually wait until late October to cut these plants back, but nature had something different in mind. Most plants were knocked over and covered soil. I spent this morning cutting and transplanting.
The trout stream flows the length of the property and is usually very lazy. It turned into a raging river with the floods. The house sits far enough north of the water that it is never a threat, but even today I can hear it roaring as I sit in the house. The beehives, too, are at the top of my garden and were never in danger.
I don't think anybody will be talking about drought in the mountains for sometime to come.
Some bee concerns: During the worst of the rain, the bees were confined to the hives for 3 days without a chance to get out. Each hive has a full shallow super full of capped honey, so I was not worried about them having food, but very curious if they had started to consume some of the stores. I was able to open the hives on Thursday and they had started eating a very small amount of the stored honey. Not enough to be alarming.
Small Hive Beetles. When I took the extra supers off the hives, there were several frames of drawn comb, in addition to a couple of capped frames of sourwood honey. I wanted to store the capped honey in case I needed to feed later during the winter. As I was putting the frames into sealed storage, I saw 2 small hive beetles. I had not seen one before. After talking to several friends, I learned that SHB is not much of a problem in the mountains. Most report seeing a few during the season, but never enough to be a concern. My only fear is that my newest nuc came from the upstate of South Carolina where SHB can be a problem. We're only 13 miles from the SC border, but our temperature differences are dramatic. Cool here, hot there. I looked very carefully but did not see any more beetles in the hives. I'll monitor closely in the spring.
Today, for the first time, I saw a varroa mite on a bee. I knew there were some varroa in both hives and have treated with the powdered sugar shake, but this is the first time I've actually seen a mite on a bee. It made me sad. On the advice of Jennifer Berry from the University of Georgia, I'm going to do another sugar shake in November. The population of the hive at that point should be mostly adult bees thereby exposing a greater number of bees to treatment as opposed to brood. Makes sense to me.
Both of these hives are going into cold weather much stronger than Walter did last year. Doesn't mean I won't worry. I will. I've had 2 beekeepers tell me recently they went to their hives in the morning and saw many bees and when they visited in the afternoon, the bees were gone. It just happened that quickly. My main concern for these hives continues to be the threat of damage from bears. They are quite active in the area and there have been several times in recent days when the dogs drove them away from the area surrounding the garden and beehives.
Goldenrod and asters are still blooming, but the amount of pollen being brought in has decreased significantly. Much colder weather is forecast for later in the week.
On Friday, December 16, 8" of snow fell in my area of the mountains. Up to 2' of snow was recorded in other areas of the mountains and some folks are still without power. Thankfully, power was not lost at my house. My biggest concern has been that I couldn't get into the garden to check on the hives. The gate has been frozen shut. Today, December 27, I finally got it open enough to squeeze through. On my initial visit to the hives, there were no bees to be seen. I rapped on both and got a reassuring hum from Ora, but nothing from Walter. This had been exactly the opposite response 2 weeks ago. I pulled the boards from underneath the screened bottoms and could see obvious signs of activity in each hive so I was not too worried. I also removed the entrance reducers and could see some dead bees in each hive but not enough to be concerned. Bees die in the cold. I walked back to the house and after a few minutes I thought I saw some bees flying and decided to take another trip to see what was going on. There were lots of bees pouring out of Walter! Hungry bees! I keep sugar syrup stored in the fridge, just in case, so I took out the Boardman feeder and back to the garden I went. The following pix show the girls hungrily lapping up the sugar syrup. The bees in Ora never did come out, but obviously things are fine inside and this hive is still heavy with stored honey. Once again, the 2 hives have behaved in complete opposite manner to the other but bottom line is that both are fine. I keep humming George Michaels - "You Gotta Have Faith".
The front yard down by the stream.
