In October, the days will be colder and the bees won’t fly as much. The queen is laying fewer if any eggs now and the entire colony is preparing for the cold winter months.

Mouse Guards
• If you haven’t done so already, be sure to put your mouse guards on – but make sure a mouse does not get trapped inside. Look inside the entrance with a flashlight. If you do not see mouse nesting material on the bottom board, you’re probably okay. If you do, you need to remove it otherwise the mouse could cause severe damage over the winter.

Feeding
• A general guideline is that one colony will need approximately 70 pounds of honey to make it through winter. Medium frames can hold about 3.5 lbs of capped honey. Deep frames can hold over 7 lbs of capped honey. If you’re worried that your bees will not have enough stores going into winter, you can feed 2:1 sugar syrup. During the cold winter months consider winter patties, fondant or candy boards.

Wrapping Hives for Winter
• Hives get wrapped when days are consistently too cold for the bees to fly or nights are consistently in the clustering temperatures. Wrap and or insulate per your preference.

Top Bar Hives
• Now is the time to start moving your bars and reorganizing them for winter on a warm day in October but trust the bees have their own plan with how they position themselves and their stores.
• If you have a center entrance hive, that means moving them toward the center with your follower board on either side of the hive entrance with all stores down to one side.
• Think about what you will use as a windbreak and make sure your mouse guards are on.

Varroa Mites
• With temperatures getting colder, treatment options for varroa are limited. By now there is little to no brood for them to reproduce in and a long brood break ahead during winter.
• The Honey Bee Coalition has excellent materials on managing varroa if you have not started with VSH bees – which we all should be doing for the future of honey bee health as well as the continued usefulness of hive products. Read more here.