From the Fields: Jason Miller, Placer County beekeeper

By Jason Miller
Placer County beekeeper

The hives are dormant for the winter. Most of our hives are at the indoor wintering building in North Dakota. They won’t come out to California until February when we get them ready for almond pollination. Then we’ll start going through the hives to see the losses and what the hive strength looks like.

There’s a lot of advantages to putting bees inside during the winter. You reduce disease loads because they’re dormant. A lot of the disease reproduces in the brood, which is the baby bees. Once you shut down the queen, she stops laying eggs. Your queen will last longer by giving her a break over winter because she has a finite number of eggs and sperm in her life. 

Your need to give the bees artificial feed goes down significantly because they’re not consuming much. If they’re outdoors, we’d have to feed them artificial sucrose. Inside, they are living off their excess honey from the summer. We don’t open them, we don’t feed them, we don’t touch them. A lot of commercial operations are doing that now. We have our own indoor wintering building that we own, manage and put our bees in.

It was quite cool and wet this year, so the bees built up late. It was a very mild spring and summer. The bees did well through summer because of the mild conditions, but they certainly built up later than normal. Overall, our bee strength has been pretty good, but we’ve had to be a lot more vigilant on checking our colonies. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to have healthy colonies, and that’s what is needed for pollinating all the fruits and vegetables that we enjoy eating. 

We’re getting in touch with our growers and landowners for next year and making sure the counts are good and what their needs are: Have they pulled acres out? Have they planted new acreage? We’re starting to gauge things in that sense.