How to heft a beehive?
Are you wondering how to heft a beehive? In this blog post, I will give you all the information you require heft your beehives in the winter. Starting with understanding why hefting is important, how to set your colonies up for winter hefting, what is the most important time to heft your beehives and what to do if you find your colonies are light during hefting.
Why hefting is important?
Hefting your beehives is one of the most important techniques to learn and understand. Hefting is a simple technique which involves tilting your entire beehive up onto one end and assessing the weight of the stores inside. If effectively gives you a reasonable estimate of the amount of stores remaining in the colony, with breaking open the colony and looking for stores, which is very intrusive to the colony and unnecessary.
Without being able to assess your colonies stores over winter, you are leaving to luck your colonies future survival. Different colonies consume stores at different rates and not every colony goes into winter with an equal amount of stores. It’s good practice to heft your hives every 2-3 weeks throughout the winter months, with increased frequency as winter morphs into spring as this where the rate of consumption exponentially increases (more below).
How to set your beehives up for hefting?
Hefting is relatively simple and once you get the hang of it, it takes 10-15 seconds per hive, but optimum hive set up gives you the best chance of being able to assess the stores in each beehive.
Standardisation of beehives and overwintering set up means you can compare beehives to one and other. Mixing poly and wood beehives makes this slightly more difficult, but not impossible.
For me, I like to strap the beehives together using a robust ratchet strap to contain all the beehive components in a single unit, but again, this is always required, especially if the boxes are well propolised together.
The prerequisite for hefting beehives is to ensure your beehives are well fed going into winter. I won’t go into the details within this post but it’s quite simple, your beehives should feel HEAVY for their size. If they don’t, something is wrong. Learn more about feeding to weight in the video below.
How to heft your beehives?
Hefting your beehives is simple but it’s much easier to show than to write it down. I will do both on this blog. The video below shows the four finger method for hefting but this should be taken with a pinch of salt as it’s still a very subjective method of weighing the hives.
In its most basis form, hefting is simply tilting the beehive up onto one side to attempt to gauge the amount of winter stores remaining within the colony. The more beehives you heft, the better you get at making this assessment.
The ratchet straps make this a lot easier as it holds all of the components together. All I do is approach each beehive from behind and tilt it forward (added benefit is water can track out the entrance) for 3-4 seconds and then let it sick back down. If it feels heavy for its size then all is good. If it feels average, it’s probably ok until the next heft. If it feels light, then you need to take action (see actions below).
I appreciate the above advice is very simplistic but after a couple of seasons, you calibrate your hefting technique and things become easier. Here is a good way to think about this. Your hives should feel heavier than you think going into winter and if at any time you think they feel light, take action. Taking action on a colony that doesn’t need it, is far better than not taking action on a colony that does need it.
What is the most important time to heft your beehive?
It’s important to heft your hives all the way through winter every 2 – 3 weeks; however, as you move into February this should increase to every 2 weeks and then every single week in March/April. As the days get longer and the bees start to rear more brood, the demand for carbohydrate (stores) is increased exponentially. As more brood emerges, more brood can be laid due to extra bees in the colony, creating a snowball effect on the consumption of stores. This is the time that requires the most amount of focus from the beekeeper. It’s very easy to get caught out and believe me, finding a booming colony dying at this point in the year due to lack of stores is heart-breaking. Always err on the safe side and don’t let them starve.
What to do if your colony is light when you heft?
The good thing is that feeding a light colony to ensure they get through winter is very easy and you cannot overfeed at this point of the year using this technique. If you come across a colony that is light, the easiest way to feed at any point throughout the winter/early spring, is my placing fondant directly on top of the frames and placing an upturned poly ashforth feeding over the top to provide a sealed, warm environment for them to access the food.
If you are into emergency feeding, I wouldn’t recommend feeding above a crown board as if it turns cold, it’s not guaranteed the bees will be able to access the fondant. It’s much better to be lay the fondant directly on the frames so there is no possible chance the bees cannot access it. Once the bees get going into the season properly and the bees are bringing in fresh nectar, you can safely remove the fondant and scrape off any excess from the frames. You immediately add your supers at this point ready for storage of nectar.
Take a look at the video below which shows the emergency feeding process in action.
Conclusion
Hefting beehives is an art form and requires your judgement to ensure your bees have sufficient stores to see them through the winter. It gets easier and easier each year, but just remember, if they feel light, take action. You cannot overfeed a winter colony as they don’t store fondant in cells at this point in the year. You just remove the excess at the end of the season. It’s a very cheap insurance policy to ensure your bees get through winter.
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