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Tag: borage

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Most people only think of garden flowers or fields of rape as honey and pollen yielders but many trees have hidden talents.

Whilst we are familiar with stone-fruit and pip-fruit blossom the other forest trees have more unseen flowers. Chestnut and hawthorn are two glorious show-offs but have you ever noticed the beautiful racemes of the sycamore? What about the flower-heads of field maple or ivy? If you do an internet search for these two you’ll get all sorts of sites as suggestions which will tell you the height, the spread, the leaf shape, leaf colour and so on, but the poor flower doesn’t get a mention.

The bees know them though and the sycamore and field-maple are worked so avidly that it can tempt them away from the oil seed rape. In fact 10% of my clear spring honey in 2020 was from the field-maple. Maple is a lovely sweet honey but sycamore has a strong nutty flavour which might not be to everyone’s taste, but to others it’s a distinctive difference.

By mid June 2023 I had done four extracting sessions and everything was looking very encouraging. The harvest so far was exceeding 2022. At this point it all went pear-shaped.

I thought the dearth of the June gap was not going to occur as field-bean continued flowering. However by the middle of the month there was no nectar coming in. What they had collected was ripened and capped and supers only half full were abandoned in favour of just collecting pollen. Cold late-autumnal weather has brood nests visually shrinking and winter preparations underway. There is no excited chasing after a lovely summer ‘flow’ and the poor bees just seem to be passing the time of day drifting around.

Two hives taken over to Debden Green were initially given an extra two empty supers for all this lovely borage honey on the doorstep. Five days later these had to be removed because the weather was too cold for them to cope with such a large empty space to heat. The inclement weather has continued throughout the month so these two hives will probably come home having achieved nothing.

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Having a corrupt web site has unfortunately meant a blog-free year to date. This means that I’ve been able to spend more time with the bees rather than sitting trying to think what I could write. However, a much more knowledgable beekeeper was able to sort the problems and we are back on air again

Fortunately I practise what I preach and I can look back through my hive records, my varroa-count records and other documents to recall the story of the year.

Starting the year with 9 hives rather than the usual 8 was a wise precaution as one became queenless. How I don’t know.

A glorious week in February meant all the hives could be opened and given a treatment with Apivar. A weekly check was made and the strips were removed once the drop had been zero for two consecutive weeks.

An early spring meant that I was able to start spring-cleaning in early March. Every hive was given a clean floor, brood box and crown board and every frame was scraped clean of wax and propolis. My idea of cleanliness doesn’t necessarily match that of the bees but we both have to compromise to live together.

Over the apiary hedge was 175 acres of oil seed rape. My expectations of stacks of full honey-tubs were rudely dashed. Continual dry weather meant a low nectar yield so my rape harvest was below expectations.

Continual sunshine meant that the girls could at least continue flying day after day. It also meant that the airfield over the road was able to yield an abundance of ragwort: not good news. Ragwort has a most unpleasant flavour and it taints anything with which it is blended. I have a stack of tubs sitting on one side maturing in the hopes that the ragwort influence will slowly decrease.

I have experimented with sublimation. I bought an electric vaporizer and also a Gasvap. Both had to be used with a full-face gas mask although with the electric vaporizer it was possible to use it safely simply by standing well downwind as it warmed up. The Gasvap was not so successful. It was necessary to stand right by the entrance whilst the Gasvap belched (most of the) fumes into the hive entrance. Having a beard meant that the gas-mask was not a tight fit to my face and I was breathing in oxalic acid fumes. Not recommended.

Madeleine, my trainee/apprentice this year had a thorough grounding as she worked with me almost the entire season. Her help was invaluable, especially when it came to moving hives over to Debden Green to establish an out-apiary beside the borage. Yes, lovely borage honey. A beautiful, almost clear runny honey and the yield was sufficient to get me close to my target harvest weight.

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Apple weekend at Audley End House was once again a terrific weekend. English Heritage say the foot-fall was 4500 over the two days. Talking bees, pollination and honey for two days solid was very tiring but greatly rewarding. One very interesting visitor who introduced herself to me was none other than Ted Hooper’s granddaughter Lauren who told me that sadly, they no longer have a beekeeper in the family.

Winter Feed 2017

The bees have all had their usual amount of winter feed; 8l of sugar solution and 3l of waste honey. Hive 1 had the container of Apikel which I was given. Interestingly not all of this had been taken down but it could have been a case of them not liking it. I removed the feeder, gingerly removed the middle frame to find brood in all stages so carefully replaced it knowing they were queen-right. Had there been a problem, some of the earliest brood would have had emergency queen cells. As it was, the reason was that apart from the brood in the centre, the brood box was chock-a-block with stores.

Three other hives have only taken some of their feed and I’m hoping they are in a similar state because they had ample nectar flowing from all the volunteer borage in the field behind. As Tom, the farmer, freely admitted to me, "Yes, we cocked up there."

Volunteer borage amongst the wheat

The Apivar is almost at the end of its recommended insertion time but the varroa are still dropping high weekly figures. Some are still up in the hundreds per week.  Hopefully they should fall to single figures any day now and the strips can be removed.

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