Key Management Techniques for Beekeeping in Late Autumn

Experienced beekeepers always treat late autumn management as the beginning of the beekeeping year. The main task of late autumn management is to lay the foundation for the colony's overwintering and the following early spring breeding, achieving more young bees, a strong colony, sufficient food, and fewer diseases. Management should focus on the following tasks:

1. Raising overwintering bees. Bees that participated in honey-making and brood-rearing work in autumn have weaker constitutions and generally cannot overwinter. Therefore, young bees raised in autumn should be used to renew the colony and raise age-appropriate overwintering bees. The rearing of age-appropriate overwintering bees should be arranged so that the last batch of young bees can all emerge from their cells by late October, having neither taken on work nor yet able to fly. Around the Cold Dew solar term, the queen must be made to stop laying eggs; otherwise, the young bees raised will not be age-appropriate overwintering bees, which will bring great losses to beekeeping production. 2. Storing sufficient overwintering feed. The quality and sufficiency of overwintering feed have a great bearing on the colony's safe overwintering. Most high-quality honey can be digested and absorbed by bees, resulting in less accumulated feces; poor-quality honey contains more substances that bees cannot digest, resulting in more accumulated feces. Excessive feces will make bees restless, unable to cluster well, and may even cause dysentery. Therefore, honey that crystallizes easily and sugar of poor quality are both unsuitable as overwintering feed. The amount of overwintering feed should be determined according to the overwintering method: for those migrating to the south for breeding, leave 1-1.5 honeycombs per frame of bees; for stationary beekeeping, 1.5-2 honeycombs are needed per frame of bees. Generally, each colony needs to store 10 kg of high-quality honey or 15 kg of white sugar. At the same time, before entering overwintering, the pollen combs should be pulled out of the hive for use in early spring breeding. 3. Carry out good bee mite control. Generally, before the colony enters overwintering, during the early stage of natural brood cessation, a treatment should be applied once with new drugs with good mite-killing effects such as “Mite Puli Ke”. To improve drug efficacy, bees should be fed before medication, which can enhance the bees' resistance; at the same time, after satiation the bees' abdomens stretch out, allowing the bee mites hiding in the abdomen to be treated thoroughly. 4. Stop the queen from laying eggs at the appropriate time. In late autumn, temperatures drop and nectar and pollen sources are about to end, making it unsuitable for the colony to continue breeding. To maintain the colony strength of overwintering bees and the vitality of the queen, in the later stage of raising overwintering bees, honey and pollen can be used to fill the brood cells, compress the egg-laying circle, and then honey can be poured over the few remaining brood combs; after pouring 2-3 times, the queen will stop laying. At the same time, move the colony to a cooler place, face the entrance north, expand the bee space to 15-20 mm, pull out the pollen combs, remove insulation materials, and make the queen stop laying eggs early. To make the colony cluster early, the queen can also be confined in a queen cage of 5×3×1.5 cm to prompt her to shrink her abdomen and stop laying. After the queen stops laying eggs until the end of November, the colony must be moved to a sunny, dry place for overwintering.