By Susan EMERSON NUTTER

LISBON, Ohio – What a winter – or lack of one – my area of northeast Ohio is experiencing this year. Only now, the first week of January, have we dipped below the 30-degree mark for any length of time. The week of Christmas found our area bathed in the warmth of 50-degree days. Granted, before becoming a beekeeper, this would be an ideal winter as far as I’m concerned. However, warm winters are so hard on our bees, and likewise, hard on the beekeeper.

The ideal scenario for an Ohio beekeeper, or any place that experiences true seasons where winter runs from about mid-November until mid-March, is to go into winter with hives heavy with honey and pollen stores, a feeder board in place filled with fondant or a sugar cake, and some kind of moisture board on top of that. Some people wrap their hives, or put up windbreaks – some don’t, but either way it would be best for the bees if they had everything they needed in hive, and then the cold weather came and stayed until spring.

Bees in the northeast are meant to “hibernate.” Everything in the hive is meant to slow down – egg-laying, especially, and consuming stores preferably. But this has not been the case for my area of the world this winter.

With weather above 45 degrees coupled with a warming sun, the bees become active. Being active means they need fuel. There are no flowers. There is no real available pollen. So, they eat their stores at, what one friend put it best - “an unsustainable pace.” Sure, as beekeepers we can feed fondant and sugar cakes and that is what has had to happen.

Ideally, though, the bees will have stored up the honey they need to get through the winter with the fondant and/or sugar cakes placed in the hive in the fall being their back-up source of nutrition to help them get through early spring waiting for the first trees and flowers to bloom.

With the warmer winter we are now experiencing, our supplement feeding is not a security blanket it is meant to be, but is now what the bees are surviving on – and that’s not good.

I was feeling very frustrated come December. I felt I was the only one experiencing such things. I felt I’d let the bees down by not feeding heavily in the fall. Yes, for the most part, my hives were heavy at the beginning of November, but as a beekeeper, I always wonder what else I could have done.

And then I began reading through social media beekeeping groups in my area of the state and find I am not alone. One veteran beekeeper who is more successful than anyone I’ve come across appears to be in a panic. One of those warm December days found him lifting the backs of hives to measure their weight. Finding them lighter than they should have been prompted him to lift a few lids and look at the supplement sugar cakes. Theses cakes meant to be a fallback food source the bees should not need to access until at least the beginning of March – they were already half gone.

I needed foot surgery and scheduled it for the first week of January. I am currently writing this with my left foot elevated with an ice pack under my knee. I get my walking boot tomorrow, and should be in a shoe by the first week of February. Any other year, this would be fine. Now I sit here knowing my bees might be running out of food. Stressful? Yes!

My grocery order for the week included two 25lb bags of sugar. I will be spending the next few days making more sugar boards to be at the ready for another 45-plus degree sunny day so possibly my husband and I can get in the bees to give them more food.

Usually our winters are filled with putting together new frames, making hive boxes and updating our Instagram and Facebook pages. This winter it will all be about watching the weather, making supplement feed, and hoping for the best. Beekeeping is always an adventure!