Seasonal Beekeeping Calendar

Follow our seasonal beekeeping calendar for all tasks from spring inspections to winter feeding and condensation.

Spring Beekeeping Season

Beekeeping is a year-round hobby, regardless of where you live, as each season brings particular tasks for both the beekeeper and the honeybees. Each task is geared toward one of two things — keeping the bees thriving or collecting a harvest — with many tasks overlapping the two goals. After all, you can’t have a successful harvest if you don’t have healthy bees, right? So, we decided to do a four-part series covering each season and its associated tasks to help fellow beekeepers keep their to-do lists in order and their honeybees thriving, starting with everyone’s favorite season, spring.

Identifying Spring

But first, what exactly is spring? No matter where you live in the United States, astronomical spring begins with the vernal equinox. In 2024, this means spring within all regions of the U.S. will arrive on March 19. This is when, in many areas of the U.S., springtime flowers appear in garden centers, and daffodils and tulips decorate porch steps. Trees begin to release their newly formed leaves, and baby creatures of all kinds are born. Even better, spring breaks occur in every school district within a week of astronomical spring, ensuring every man, woman, and child knows that spring has sprung.

However, in my Arkansas apiaries, my bees do not agree with this date. My honeybees insist spring begins many weeks sooner, way back in February. This is the time of year when our Italian-based queens start ramping up brood production for spring build-up, varroa mites begin to increase their loads, honey stores are depleted, small hive beetles become an issue, and diseases such as nosema, foulbrood, sacbrood, black queen virus, and more begin to emerge. These in-hive activities have been taking place weeks before the vernal equinox during what most of us consider the tail-end of winter. And it’s here that many begin their beekeeping season in error.

First Spring Inspections

Far too often, I hear beekeepers talk of the first inspections for the year occurring not in February nor during the first days of March. Instead, I hear countless stories of first inspections occurring as late as the middle of April. In our region, opening inspections only occur after spring build-up has nearly been completed and the spring honey flow has begun. Even more alarming is that those first inspections occur after the season’s swarming activities start. Swarms have already left the hives,and colonies that are unsuccessful at requeening are already failing. Early queen issues, disease detection, and end-of-winter starvation have been missed. These folks ask me why their colonies made it through winter only to die at the first sign of spring. It’s because spring had already sprung before the checking of the colonies.

So when does spring truly begin? For both my bees and myself, it’s when they begin their spring build-up phase as they prepare for not only the upcoming nectar flow but also the swarming season. Why? Because they’re preparing for reproduction. Creation does this in spring, and this is when that first inspection should occur.

For those raising nucleus colonies and early season queens, many begin opening hives and preparing them for spring production in February. In my area, I typically start my nuc production season by the first week of March. In more northern regions, this may look more like April to May. The point is that inspections should begin with the intent to prepare for spring early and to determine exactly when your particular bees have declared spring’s arrival. This timing varies not only with the region but often with the specific honeybee breeds within the apiary and local weather conditions.

For instance, my Russian-based colonies always disagree with my Italians. Many years, spring build-up for my Russians won’t begin for another 3 to 4 weeks after my Italians begin their spring build-up. So, each year, I watch each breed type closely and let them tell me when to begin our springtime tasks. So far, this has never failed me, as the bees know much more about spring than I do.

But what if you’re not planning to create nuclei or raise queens? Do you still need to begin spring inspections and tasks so early? That depends on whether you’re willing to miss those significant events that cause the end-of-winter to early-spring colony losses. For instance, if you know on March 1 that your queen hasn’t begun brood build-up and previous experience suggests she should have, you know to start looking for causes and will likely have time to offer a remedy. She may be a failing queen. The colony may be hungry. There may even be disease forming. If you wait until the typical end of March to early April for the first inspection, that colony would likely be past the point of no return once you notice the issue. Early detection allows for early correction.

Spring Beekeeping Tasks

So, you brought your bees through a successful winter, and now the spring build-up is happening. What’s next? Feeding, varroa control, disease detection, and the splitting of colonies are the primary tasks of every spring. This is the time to replace those winter dead-outs and weak queens. Swarm traps should be mounted, and honey jars should be cleaned and prepped for spring honey harvest. It’s a very busy time for beekeepers and honeybees alike.

However, spring is also the time we begin preparing colonies for the upcoming stresses of summer. One of the most significant ways to do this is through mite treatments. Proper mite control can’t be overstated. Just as the honeybees are increasing their brood production, so are the varroa mites. However, of all the annual treatments, spring treatments are often the least conducted, making it more difficult for beekeepers to bring mite counts down over the summer and fall in time for a successful winter. As in all things, proper timing and proper preparation go hand-in-hand with success, and spring mite treatments are a part of a successful operation.

Don’t Forget to Feed

Sometimes, we get so caught up in a beekeeping spring’s apparent frenzy and chaos that we forget one of the most fundamental keys to keeping bees healthy — feeding. Far too often, we beekeepers look around at all the colors of flowers and imagine our bees bringing in loads of nectar just waiting for the harvest. But this is often a false sense of comfort. Misread the spring signs, and the bees can die seemingly overnight of starvation in the middle of an orchard loaded with nectar-producing flowers.

How, you might say? Rain, dry days, local competition, hybridized flowering plants, non-nectar-producing GMO crops, and more often create a false sense of security. Rain appears to water the forage, while dry days help the nectar flow. Non-nectar-producing crops and flower gardens are often mistaken for nectar-producing versions. So always inspect closely for nectar/ honey levels within the colony, offer supplemental feeding as needed, and don’t overharvest those springtime supers. Just remember to pull the sugar water once honey supers are added.

Keeping honeybees thriving and healthy requires year-round tasks and close attention to the timing of the seasons. Springtime is one of the busiest times for honeybees and beekeepers alike as everyone prepares for the upcoming spring nectar flow and reproduction cycle.

Spring Time Beekeeping To-Do List

• Check for queenrightness often.
• Monitor brood build-up.
• Monitor drone production.
• Monitor and treat disease pres­ence.
• Replace old, weak, or otherwise failing queens.
• Check for swarming preparations.
• Make splits as needed for swarm control.
• Place swarm traps and check frequently.
• Raise new queens.
• Add supers as needed during the nectar flow.
• Add supplemental feeding as needed.
• Remove sugar water at the nectar flow.
• Move colonies as needed for forage.
• Conduct varroa counts.
• Apply varroa treatments.
• Add new frames and foundation for comb building.
• State hive inspections, if needed.
• Attend spring beekeeping meet­ings and conferences.
• Check-in with your mentor.
• Purchase additional nuclei/colo­nies/queens.
• Mow/weed around the apiary.
• Watch for robbing.
• Remove entrance reducers as needed.
• Inspect bear fencing.

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Summer Beekeeping Season

Next in our series on the seasons of beekeeping: The drenching hot days of summer and its associated tasks and events. Summer is often considered beekeeping season for many, as supers loaded with spring honey are harvested, and the bees busily replace the honey with summer nectar. However, much more than honey production occurs during the summer. What we do with our bees at this time of year is so significant that the honeybees’ winter survival often depends on it.

The Markers of Summer

As discussed in the first part of this series regarding spring, what we think summer is, sometimes differs from other creatures. When I speak of summer, I’m referring to the time of year that begins right after the spring nectar flow ends and lasts until the first days of cooler weather.

This is the time of year in our area when spring rains dry up, temperatures soar, and the humidity rapidly increases to ridiculous levels. In most of our region, this is also when non-irrigated forage dries up, not to return until the following spring. May is our typical introduction to summer, and it continues until the end of August and even to the middle of September in most years.

Summer Hive Inspections

Hopefully, by early summer, you’ve already done your first hive inspections, with several follow-up inspections. If not, one or more primary swarms will have already flown the coop, as well as several secondary and potentially tertiary swarms, leaving many unmanaged colonies hopelessly queenless. Others will likely have starved out or succumbed to disease. Many colonies will have already been lost, making early spring inspections necessary for a successful beekeeping operation. Whether you skipped the early season inspections or not, it’s never too late to start. Colonies still need regular inspections throughout the summer months to ensure all is well. The good news is the risk of springtime diseases drops significantly and even disappears as the cooling rains end, and warmer weather makes it more difficult for pathogens to thrive.

However, queens need close monitoring for vigor and laying ability, regardless of age. Colonies will be near their maximum for capacity and foraging activities by mid-summer. This means supers need to be added as the honey flow continues, while additional deeps will likely be needed to provide extra brood space as nucleus colonies grow. In a nutshell, life gets a little bit easier for the bees at this time of year — most of the time.

Dearth and the Honey Harvest

Early summer may or may not offer plentiful forage; a dearth in beekeeping terms. In my area, we experience a four-week dearth as we wait for agricultural crops to bloom. Other areas with ample wilderness, unmanaged pastures, and large areas of neighborhood landscaping are areas that often continue some form of summer nectar flow, many times right up until the fall honey harvest. Still, other areas offer only enough forage for a springtime flow, with the rest of the season — summer through fall — being nothing more than one very long dearth.

The potential for a summer dearth, along with checking for queenrightness and other issues, is what makes summer inspections and feeding so vital. If you over-harvest the spring honey and don’t offer supplemental feed throughout the summer, the bees will likely starve. So it’s a good idea to under-harvest a bit, particularly if you’re not planning to offer supplemental feed, as most regions experience variances in forage availability each year. The good news is once those supers are being loaded again, the bees and the beekeeper can rest a little easier knowing they made it through another dearth period successfully.

Mite Control

In addition to the continued monitoring of queenrightness and sufficient food stores, maintaining manageable levels of varroa mite loads and the timely application of mite treatments are needed during the summer months. These treatments are difficult to administer in regions experiencing a summer-long nectar flow, as most treatments can’t be used during the nectar flow. However, there are options that allow for a knockdown during a nectar flow, and treatments that may be applied between the spring harvest and the beginning of supering for the summer flow.

While it’s true these treatments must occur during the hottest time of the year when the bees are not keen on being disturbed, and no beekeeper wants to be inside a hot bee suit, a colony’s winter success depends heavily on low mite counts to be maintained during summer to fend off the emergence of latent disease within the colony later in the season. Properly timed and properly applied mite treatments during summer allow the bees to be as mite-free and disease-free as possible. These bees need to be healthy to raise bees strong enough to go the distance during the many long winter months. While a hassle, summer treatments shouldn’t be underestimated as they’re often one of the most important determining factors in winter survival.

Summertime Splits

Many beekeepers can’t have enough bees to satisfy them. Well-managed honeybees can be split throughout summer via splitting or swarming. However, when making summer splits, keep a few key aspects in mind to ensure success.

The primary key is to either raise your own queens or source good quality queens. Far too often, in nearly every region across the U.S., available queens diminish dramatically right after the springtime rush of our primary splitting season. But if you can find a queen, you can make a split. Just keep in mind that splits must be large enough by the beginning of winter to increase their odds of winter survival. Late splits also often require supplemental feeding until spring. However, with good quality queens, properly sized splits, and ample food stores, these late-season splits are just as capable of surviving winter as splits made in the spring.

What we do for our bees during summer largely determines whether they survive the next winter or not. Continued inspections, supplemental feeding, requeening, and mite checks and treatments are the primary concerns of summer management, regardless of a honey flow. So keep doing those inspections.

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Fall Beekeeping Season

Late summer into early fall is another busy season for most beekeepers. Both the bees and the beekeepers wrap up the final days of summer and begin preparation for the upcoming winter. Tasks include swarm control — yes, bees swarm in the fall, too — mite treatments, queen checks, feed checks, and hopefully, a nice-sized honey harvest.

Signs of Fall

As always, the first step to a successful season is recognizing the signs that fall is here. While each region typically experiences an increase in rainfall, cooler temperatures, and shorter days as fall takes over, these aren’t the only signs to notice. In many beekeeping regions, the shift in forage type and availability indicates the time to shift gears.

For instance, in our region, once the final summer ornamentals and wildflowers are gone, it’s time for the final honey harvest and beginning of fall preparations, which may be as early as the beginning of August. However, for those of us with beeyards along the soybean fields, our fall usually begins at the end of August. Each location’s timing may differ slightly, but the tasks should be roughly the same.

Fall Hive Inspections

Fall is much like spring in reverse. As the days get shorter, the queen begins to slow egg laying, and the brood chamber begins to shrink. If queen excluders weren’t utilized during the spring and summer nectar flows, the brood chamber may have moved upward into the supers. If so, the queen will need to be moved back down to the bottom chamber with as much brood as possible being moved into this bottom chamber as well. Food stores, when food is sufficient, will be moved down closer to the brood chamber by the house bees as foragers continue to fill any remaining supers.

In regions with a fall nectar flow, supering may still be necessary to avoid fall swarming, while late splits may be done if a well-mated queen is available. Brood chambers should also be checked to ensure queenrightness, and for a solid but diminishing brood pattern. Any supers that need extracting should be noted and extracted promptly.

Fall Mite Control

Of all the mite treatments provided, summer and fall treatments are arguably the two most important for successful mite control. By fall, the varroa mite numbers are at their highest, regardless of whether all other treatments have been conducted properly. This is because varroa is just reaching capacity while the bees are declining in numbers. Any mites left after treatment will happily live side-by-side with (or rather, attached to) the bees throughout the winter, quietly continuing the colony’s destruction. The good news is that because fall temperatures are generally lower in most regions, temperature-dependent options such as formic acid and Apigaurd become viable options once again, making success over winter a much higher likelihood.

Honey Harvest and Supplemental Feeding

If you still have honey to harvest in the fall after the summer dearth, consider yourself blessed. Nectar dearths can deplete honey stores seemingly overnight. However, the key to harvesting sustainably is to leave ample honey stores for the winter, preferably without needing supplemental feeding. In our region, this means leaving a full deep of honey stores as well as all honey located in the brood chamber when we pull our excess honey in September. This minimizes our feed expenses and winter feeding trips to the beeyard.

There are, however, many beekeepers who either harvest all of the honey or who simply have none to harvest. In this case, supplemental feeding with 2:1 (2 parts sugar to 1 part water) will be necessary to allow the bees enough time to store and convert the sugar water into sugar honey for the upcoming winter. 1:1 is still fine to use in a pinch during this season; however, 2:1 provides a thicker syrup that requires less effort from the bees to dehydrate it down for the winter and is the ratio recommended for fall feeding. This supplemental feeding may take many trips to the beeyard and quite a lot of sugar as well, but it’s necessary for winter survival when no, or insufficient, honey remains after the summer dearth or fall harvest. Fall keeps the bees and beekeepers busy as they prepare for the upcoming winter. Healthy, thriving queens must be present; varroa mite populations must be reduced; supers must be extracted, cleaned, and stored; honey must be filtered and stored, while any last-minute splits and requeening must be done. Finally, any supplemental feeding must occur to get the colonies up to weight before the cold of winter sets in. So don’t delay in fall preparations; the bees’ success depends on it.

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Winter Beekeeping Season

For many beekeepers, winter is a difficult time. Why? Because we can’t see our bees any time we want and we worry. We worry they’re too cold. We worry they’re out of food. We worry, essentially, that they’ll perish. And for good reason. Across the country, beekeepers are losing an average of 40 percent of honeybee colonies — or more — annually, and many of these losses are occurring during winter. Why? Lots of reasons, with heavy mite loads and starvation being the top two causes in many cases. However, with a bit of planning ahead of time, winter doesn’t have to be so scary.

Continue to Control Varroa

Most often, when we lose honeybees during the winter, it’s believed to be from starvation. Beekeepers visiting their colonies during a break in the cold weather report seeing hives empty of bees, often with little to no honey left in the frames. However, instead of starvation, far too often, these signs suggest the losses are due to not treating or under-treating for varroa mites.

To reduce these losses, beekeepers should have varroa counts under control before the beginning of winter. However, many beekeepers, myself included, opt for a winter treatment before the winter solstice when daylight hours begin to lengthen and brood rearing begins. This timing allows for a broodless, or nearly broodless, colony which affords the best opportunity to destroy as many mites as possible. This, of course, depends on where you live and what type of treatment you’re using. For example, when using formic acid, the strips and their temperature range is above 50 degrees Fahrenheit. Depending on your location, it may be too cold to be opening hives and performing hive checks.

Continue to Monitor Food Stores

Regardless of where you maintain your bees, the best food source for honeybees during any season of the year is their own honey. Unlike sugar blocks, grease patties, and any other white sugar-based food source, a colony’s honey has what the colony needs to maintain health — vitamins, minerals, pollen, amino acids — all in addition to basic carbohydrates. Yet, we beekeepers often rob far too much honey, resulting in insufficient winter stores.

So, what’s a beekeeper to do? Leave more honey. If you live in the south, the general recommendation is to leave a single deep or one to two supers full of honey sitting on top of the bottom deep brood chamber to tide the girls over during a long, cold winter. If you live farther north, many regions recommend twice that amount. So, the best way to determine how much honey you should leave behind is to contact successful beekeepers in your area to discover what they leave for the bees.

While queen checks and manipulative inspections aren’t needed during winter, regardless of how much honey you left behind, periodic feed checks are still necessary. Preferably, these quick feed checks should  be conducted on sunny, windless days when the daytime temperature reaches at least 50, preferably 55 degrees F to avoid disrupting the winter cluster. The less the cluster is disturbed, the better their chances of surviving the winter.

However, a starving bee is a dead bee, so don’t let the weather keep you from feeding your bees. Life happens and those perfectly timed inspections can’t always be done when we’d like. It’s quite possible to conduct sufficient feed checks during freezing weather. If needed, quickly put sugar blocks just under the lid. Regardless of weather, checks are conducted and bees are fed, even during snow and freezing rain. The colonies this effort alone saves is well worth battling any ugly weather nature can throw at us.

Other Winter To-Dos

Besides quick feed checks and a single mite treatment, not much else must be done for the bees during winter, making this the perfect time for repairing, assembling, and painting old and new beekeeping equipment. Other good tasks for winter are searching for new outyards and drumming up new honey customers while frequenting beekeeping meetings and catching up on last summer’s bee reading.

Winter for beekeepers is the slowest time of year and is a good time to take in a much-needed rest from all the hot, sweaty work of summertime. So, make sure your colonies are fed and treated for mites before the days turn too cold and sit back and enjoy the fruits of your labor while reading a good book on beekeeping. The dog days of summer are just around the corner.

Winter Sugar Block

(Modify proportions as needed)

• 25 pounds white granulated sugar
• 2 to 3 tablespoons essential oils* or feeding supple­ment of choice (optional)
• 8 to 16 ounces water

* Thyme, tea tree, eucalyptus, wintergreen, and spearmint oils are safe to use in sugar blocks.

In a large bucket, slowly add water and supple­ments to sugar. Use a heavy-duty mixer, a drill with a paddle bit, or large spoon to slowly combine. Add liquid until mixture resembles sand suitable for sand castles or snow suitable for building snowmen. Once combined, add sugar by the large scoopful to each hive OR scoop into plastic containers to dry over the next few days into solid sugar blocks. Store in a cool location or freeze for later use once dried.

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Kristi Cook lives in Arkansas where every year brings something new to her family’s journey for a more sustainable lifestyle. She keeps a flock of laying hens, dairy goats, a rapidly growing apiary, a large garden, and more. When she’s not busy with the critters and veggies, you can find her sharing sustainable living skills through her workshops and articles.

Originally published in the Spring through Winter 2024 issues of Countryside and Small Stock Journal and regularly vetted for accuracy.