Comb drawing is a warmer weather activity.
It does not have to be 80, but it does have
to be warm enough for bees to "festoon"
rather than cluster.
Walt Wright keeps bees in an area of the country
that does not really have much in the way of a
winter, so his bees certainly can accomplish all
the work of utilizing stored honey just about any
time they wish. If you look at the winter
temperatures where Walt keeps bees, some years,
there simply is no perceptible "winter". But
even Walt could obtain larger spring harvests
if he fed his colonies prior to the spring
blooms, a simple step much less complex than
all the checkerboarding work he willingly does.
As for the
"founding fathers" of beekeeping,
stimulative feeding has been around longer than
anyone currently alive, and is well-known to be
the most important factor in building up
a colony before the spring blooms to a size that
can take advantage of the spring blooms. Feeding
is so common among commercial beekeepers, they
have adages like
"Feed equals bees".
The old adage (coined by these same "founding
fathers" who were dragged out of their comfortable
graves in an attempt to lend attribution to the
fringe position of not doing stimulative spring
feeding) is
"Build your hives up for
the flow, not on the flow."
The effect is obvious when one uses high-quality
pedigree bees, such as NWCs (rather than mongrels
of unknown genetics, or only "bred by eyeball"
genetics). If one tosses in a pollen patty or two,
and slaps on a feeder any time after the Winter
solstice, one would be well-advised to jump back
quickly after doing so, as the colony population
will literally explode, and give the beekeeper a
nasty impact on the nose or forehead. NWCs are
very efficient utilizers of resources.
There's a simple way to determine the preferences
of your bees. If a colony has some amount of
stores, yet the colony "takes feed" in some
quantity during the period before the spring
blooms, the bees have clearly voted with their
tiny little feet, walking past the stores to
get to the feeder of syrup. Clearly, it needs
to be warm enough that the bees can break
cluster to do this, but even under worst case
conditions, one can get two or three extra
brood cycles of rearing before spring blooms
appear, and the difference in terms of net
harvests is massive.
Other factors I have found to to important include:
</font>
- Using real pollen, trapped the prior summer or
fall. "Pollen substitute drools, real pollen rules."</font>
- Using feeders of sufficient size to insure
that the colony does not run out, and thereby
get the impression that the artificial bloom
you have created is "over".</font>
- Providing sufficient pollen patties to
insure that the bees don't run out of pollen,
either. This means that one has to check and
toss in more patties if the colony is down to
"only one".</font>
- Adding boxes of drawn comb to give the
hive more brood chamber space, a step that
clearly illustrates the unwillingness of bees
to draw comb in early spring in locations
where "winter" and "spring" can be clearly
differentiated.</font>
And yes, of course "it is not
natural".
Neither is keeping bees in boxes.
The bees don't want to produce any more honey
than they need to overwinter on, so if you want
an actual crop, you have to do more than just
watch your colonies do whatever
they feel
like doing. (This is something that the
Birkenstock-and-Granola, "Mr. Natural" beekeepers
just don't seem to get, even though it is easy
to see the difference between fed and an unfed
colonies, side by side.