Take your losses in the fall: a Texas beekeeping year, month by month

By Adi & Sony

Most beekeeping calendars online were written for Pennsylvania, Minnesota or California. The speaker at a session we sat in on at a summer beekeeping clinic went looking for a graph of a Texas colony's year, could not find one, and drew her own. She manages around 500 hives in small yards between Houston and Austin, so her version is central Texas, and she said up front that it is "hyper-local". Two of her yards four miles apart behave differently because one sits on sugar sand and the other on the kind of dirt you get stuck in every time it rains.

This is our write-up of that talk, with the biology checked against extension sources. Where something is her experience rather than a published figure, we say so. Your yard will not match it to the week; the order of events is what carries over.

The shape of a Texas year

Her outline of a healthy colony on a reasonable year: a fast build-up in spring, a population peak around May and June that lines up with the main nectar flows, a dip in July and August that a northern beekeeper does not get, a smaller build-up in the fall as the colony raises its winter bees, and a slow decline to a winter low. A roller coaster, in her word, where a Pennsylvania colony climbs to a July peak and holds until winter.

December and January: the quiet months, and why a warm winter is the dangerous one

In winter the colony is not dormant, but it is close. The population drifts down a little each week; she gave the example of a hive at 20,000 bees in November that is at 19,300 in December and 18,900 in January, and called that a good winter. The queen may keep small patches of brood going, or stop altogether through a cold snap.

When it gets cold, the bees cluster. Her figure was "lower than, say, 55"; the Mid-Atlantic extension consortium puts it at 57°F: "When the temperature drops to 57° F, the bees begin to form a tight cluster" (MAAREC). The same page explains the heat source: bees in the cluster keep the brood "warm-about 93° F", with heat they make themselves.

Here is the counterintuitive part. A cold, steady winter is easier on a colony than a warm one. A clustered colony on a 45°F day is sitting still, eating slowly. On a 75°F day in January the bees fly, and as she put it, "bees age when they fly." They burn stores and wear out, with almost nothing in bloom to replace what they spend; after a recent warm, dry winter she saw bigger die-offs than usual. Texas colonies also break and re-form cluster over and over as the weather swings.

The bees that carry a colony through those months are physically different from summer bees. MAAREC gives the lifespans: about six weeks for a summer worker, while "workers reared in the fall may live as long as 6 months" (MAAREC). The leading explanation is protein stored in the bee's body, mainly a protein called vitellogenin; a review by Amdam and Omholt says protein status "appears to be a major determinant of honeybee lifespan" and that vitellogenin "seems to play a crucial role" (J Theor Biol, 2002). Hold onto that for August.

The beekeeper's job in December and January is mostly not in the hive. If you must open one, pick a dry day around 50 to 55°F and be brief. The real work is in the shed: set goals, build and repair equipment, paint boxes, so you are not doing it in a hurry in April.

The one hive job is the heft test. Stand behind the hive, take hold of the back edge and tip it up an inch off the bottom board. Most of the weight you feel is honey; bees and pollen weigh very little. If it comes up with one finger, the colony may need feeding even in January. Over a few winters your hands learn what heavy feels like. Bees eat upward through the winter, so a hive gone light on top is running down its stores.

The first pollen, and the turn nobody sees

Around New Year's Day in central Texas, the first pollen comes in. Her examples were red maple, American elm and the roadside mustard that goes by a less polite name. Pollen, not nectar. MAAREC describes the same turn in a colony with good fall stores: the bees "begin to stimulatively feed the queen, and she begins egg laying during late December or early January" (MAAREC). You will not see much of it yet, but it starts the most dangerous stretch of the year.

February and March: the hungry months

By February the queen is laying in earnest. A brood nest that was a few palm-sized patches in January can be several frames, and brood has to be kept warm, close to that 93°F figure, across the whole nest. Heating a larger nest takes fuel, and the fuel is honey. She described colonies losing weight fast once February arrives, and the first drones being raised mid-month, a sign the colony is already thinking about swarming.

February can still bring a hard freeze; the 2021 one came in the middle of the month. In that freeze, she said, the colonies that got hurt were the ones with strong young queens that had already built a big brood nest. A colony that went into winter heavy and healthy is usually ready for a cold snap without your help; her answer to the night-before-a-freeze texts from new beekeepers is that they should already be ready, and you should sit back.

Her rule for February, passed down from the commercial operation she used to work for: check your hives before Valentine's Day. February and March are the months colonies starve in Texas, and March catches people out because they think they are through it. A cool March night can finish a big hive that has been living on its last frame of honey, and a big hive starves faster than a small one because it has more mouths. Starved bees die head-first in empty cells, with the rest of the cluster on the bottom board. MAAREC adds the cold-weather version: a long cold spell can stop the cluster moving, and "the bees may starve to death only inches away from honey" (MAAREC).

The beekeeper's job in February is weight checks, more often than in winter, and feeding anything light. It is too early for much else. Feed when it is warm enough for the bees to take syrup; our fall feeding post covers the temperature that limits liquid feed and the solid-sugar alternatives.

March and April: from food to room, overnight

In March and April the colony explodes. The queen fills frame after frame, the overwintered bees die off, and the box fills with young bees. Then it flips. As she put it, the colony goes from "they need food, they need food" to "they need room, they need room," and the change can be sudden, "like the hose just gets turned on." In her area the first real nectar flow is usually yaupon holly, about the first week of April for about two weeks, though a cold snap that week can wipe it out (it did this year in most of her yards). Mexican plum and dewberry bloom earlier but give only a trickle.

New beekeepers worry that feeding will put syrup in the honey. Stop feeding when the flow starts, she said, and the change in the hive is so dramatic you would never think of feeding on top of it.

The beekeeper's jobs in March and April:

• Reverse the boxes. Over winter the bees ate their way up, so in spring the queen and the brood are often in the top box with empty comb below. Swapping the boxes puts the empty space above the brood, which is where the bees want to store incoming nectar.
• Prevent swarms. March starts prime swarm season. When you see mature drones, expect swarms. Her method is to split strong colonies herself and move the old queen into the split, because in a natural swarm it is the old queen that leaves. There are a dozen other ways; that is hers.
• Split for increase, if more hives is your goal. March is the time, which means your colonies need to be well fed and booming going into it.

May and June: the main flow, and bearding is not swarming

Populations peak in May and June, and the bees are now older, which suits a nectar flow because older bees are the foragers. For her central and southeast Texas yards the big one is Chinese tallow, which she called a fire hose (it is also on the Texas noxious and invasive plant list, which makes it illegal to sell, distribute or import live plants, though not to keep one that is already there); the Texas Apiary Inspection Service's own honey page notes "a huge flow from Chinese Tallow" heading southeast, and remembers fields of purple horsemint below San Antonio (TAIS). Further south and west, mesquite matters: in a 1908 Texas Agricultural Experiment Station bulletin, one correspondent called it the "main source in State" (Texas Honey Plants, Bulletin 102). That is old data; the land has changed since. We mention it because your flow table should come from your county, not ours.

On a hot, humid evening in tallow season, a strong hive will hang a beard of bees off the front. That is a big population moving bodies out to cool the box. It might mean they are crowded and thinking of swarming, or it might not. You only know by looking inside. Colonies are also at their most defensive now: full of old bees, in miserable weather. Not the week to mow beside the hives. In Texas there is one more reason for care: the Texas Apiary Inspection Service says Africanized bees, found in 163 of the state's 254 counties by 2006, are "more aggressive and more defensive" than European bees and "swarm and abscond more readily" (TAIS).

The beekeeper's jobs in May and June: keep adding supers so the bees have room. If you have frames with bare foundation, put them in now; bees draw wax comb far more readily on a strong flow than later. A sign the bees are finding nectar is fresh white wax along the tops of the frames.

July and August: the dearth, the harvest, and the mites

In July and August the flows slow or end, the queen lays less, the spring foragers die off, and the population dips. Mites do not dip with it. In her experience most Texas beekeepers pull honey once a year, around July, and she pulls hers in July for a specific reason: snow-on-the-prairie, a late-summer plant that is good food for bees and, in her experience, makes honey that tastes spicy and makes you cough. That is her experience and the experience of beekeepers she knows, not a measured result; we have not tasted it ourselves.

Snow-on-the-prairie (Euphorbia bicolor) is a spurge with an irritating milky sap; in a lab study, extracts of that sap injected into rats caused pain and then long-lasting, non-opioid pain relief (Basu et al., 2019). That is a lab finding about the sap, not about the honey, and not a use.

The beekeeper's jobs in July and August:

• Harvest, then check mites right after the supers come off, and treat if the count is over your threshold. In a Texas August, read the label for temperature before you pick a product: the Formic Pro label wants daytime highs between 50 and 85°F on the day you apply it and warns that highs above 92°F in the first three days may lead to excessive bee, brood and queen loss (EPA label). Other products have their own ranges. Our post on reading a varroa count you can trust goes into the how.
• Requeen problem colonies if you are going to. You can requeen any time of year, she said, but she does not like lifting a hundred pounds of honey off to hunt for a queen.
• Take away empty space. Supers you pulled do not all need to go back on. Our reasoning, not hers: a shrinking colony has less comb to patrol, and small hive beetles do best where there is more comb than bees.

The reason the August mite check matters so much is the winter bee from the first section. The bees raised in September and October are the ones that have to live for months, and a colony whose mite load is high in late summer raises those bees in a hive full of mites and the viruses they carry.

September to November: winter bees, the fall flow, and the combine

From September the colony shifts toward winter. Fall forage in her area is hit or miss: plenty of pollen from sunflowers and asters most years, and sometimes a real nectar flow from goldenrod, boneset and Roosevelt weed (also called poverty weed or depression weed, planted around the Dust Bowl to hold soil). Look along overgrown railroad tracks, she said; that is where it grows. TAIS names broomweed, goldenrod and asters as the fall bloom bees love (TAIS). Ragweed is wind-pollinated and offers no nectar.

The beekeeper's jobs in the fall:

• Get the mites down, so the long-lived bees are raised healthy.
• Feed if they are light. If you took too much honey or a young colony did not store enough, feed in September and October. She runs her syrup somewhere between 1:1 and 2:1 most of the year because it ferments less quickly, and feeds only when it is over about 55°F so the bees can drive off the water.
• Requeen by about September, not much later. In her experience queens stop being available around early to mid October, so a colony that is queenless in November is not one you are going to fix.
• Combine the weak ones. This is the "take your losses in the fall" part. A small, weak or queen-troubled colony in October will not build up before winter, and a cluster too small to keep itself warm freezes in place. She showed a photo of exactly that: a dead little ball of bees with the queen in the middle, "one that should have been combined two months ago." Two weak colonies, or a weak one and a strong one, make one colony that can winter.

The newspaper combine is the gentle way. Put a single sheet of newspaper over the top of the stronger colony, cut a couple of slits in it with your hive tool, and set the weaker colony on top. If you want to keep a particular queen, remove the other one first. The bees chew through the paper over a day or two, and their smells mix slowly enough that they do not fight.

North, central and south Texas

Texas is big enough that one calendar cannot fit it. The Texas Apiary Inspection Service names different main crops by region: white Dutch clover in the northeast, Chinese tallow heading southeast, cotton on the High Plains, and citrus in the Rio Grande Valley, though it adds that citrus "is not the producer it used to be" (TAIS). Different plants bloom on different dates, so the main flow, and with it the swarm window and the honey harvest, falls at a different time in each region. Her central Texas dates will not be yours in the Panhandle or on the coast, and we have not found a published statewide calendar to give you instead. Ask a beekeeper in your county what bloomed when last year, then write your own dates down.

A Texas flow calendar, yours to fill in

This is the speaker's central Texas calendar, not a statewide one. Treat it as a template and replace the plants with whatever your yard actually works.

What we write down, phase by phase

The reason to keep records through the year is that the calendar above is a guess until you have two or three seasons of your own dates. So for each colony we note the heft or weight in winter and when we fed; the date of the first pollen and the first real flow; when we reversed and split; when supers went on and came off; the August mite count and the treatment date; and, in the fall, which colonies we combined and why. Bloom dates go in too, with a photo if we have one. She does the same with her phone, scrolling back through "not really good pictures, just pictures" to see when things bloomed in other years.

In HiveMind AI, feedings and treatments go on each hive's timeline with their dates, and one field-log entry can cover every hive you fed that evening. An owner records a combine from the hive's own page, with its date and a note (combine, split, move or mark a hive dead). A notebook with one page per hive works too. What matters is that next February, when you are deciding whether to feed, you can look up what that colony weighed this February and what happened next.