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Tag: nectar

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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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Although on the surface it looked as if all 10 hives had survived the winter, the first spring inspections revealed otherwise. Two were queenless and two had drone-laying queens. The fifth was so weak it really didn’t deserve to survive.

Result; I have lost half my stock. Only once before in over 40 years have I ever lost colonies in the winter.

What was strange was that queenless hives 5 and 6 continued to forage keenly bringing in both nectar and pollen. The latter is said to indicate a colony being queen-right. Test frames of eggs from another colony were inserted into both. Had they no source of queen pheromones they would have immediately started to draw out emergency queen cells. No such cells were developed which was a weird phenomenon. The colonies continued to dwindle as no eggs were being laid.

They had to be united with another colony but a normal unite wouldn’t work as they thought they already had a queen. Their population was used to supplement the abysmally small, but queenright hive 2. Bit by bit they were moved closer together until they could be shaken out in front of 2. First I caged the queen in hive 2 just as a precaution and shook out the smaller colony and took their hive right away. A few days later I then did the same with the larger. The result is that hive 2 now has sufficient bees to care for brood and the queen is merrily laying away. By the beginning of May they should be large enough to take a super.

The rape came on flower and the first supers have gone onto the five healthy hives. This is where the excitement starts to build and we see the distinct difference between colonies. By the last week of April, hive 3 has three supers and hive 4 is still on its first.

The month has been gloriously sunny and as I gardened each day, the air was full of the gentle hum of the girls hard at work in the greengage branches and down at ground level on the wallflowers.

Of course, continual sunshine meant that the nectar dried up and by week four they were getting a little cross. A solid day’s rain in the last week has hopefully corrected the situation.

However, only half the usual number of bees means half the usual amount of honey so they’ll have to work twice as hard. Maybe the lack of air pollution due to CV lockdown will give them extra impetus.

To those I promised bees this spring, don’t hold your breath.

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Three flying days in a row now which seemed to herald the glorious anticipation of yet another season but then things turned.  Three weeks of arctic winter has kept them all indoors..

All eight colonies have been flying well and vigorously foraging on the Winter Honeysuckle, the Hellebores and now the crocus. The latter have very deep nectaries so the bees have to stand on their heads and struggle to get their reward.

I have been hefting the hives since the new year just to ensure that their stores are lasting them and all seem to remain fairly heavy.

Unfortunately, the winter oxalic acid treatment was not as successful as I would have liked so I have had to give them another course of Apivar. Weekly counts continue and some hives are now down to two successive zeros whilst others are down to single figures.

The field of rape down the road, easily within flying distance, seemed to have resisted the ravages of the pigeons for a long time but eventually the vermin found it and are now tearing it to pieces.

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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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Getting an oil-seed-rape harvest gets harder as each year goes by. This year, what the bees were able to forage in the first week of flowering they ate themselves in the five terrible weeks that followed. Fortunately the field beans over the road played a part in bringing the harvest up to an acceptable level. No nice creamy white stuff with which to blend unfortunately.

I have now completed six extraction sessions. Clearer boards, of which I have quite a selection were put on first thing in the morning beneath the full supers. Put them on any later in the day and the bees have had an opportunity to gather more nectar and fill any unfilled or partly filled cells. This is all unripe so raising the average moisture content of the honey.

So, clearer boards on very early then supers gently off late in the day without disturbing them. Next morning can then be devoted entirely to uncapping and extracting with the wet supers going back on late in the evening. Put them on earlier and the sudden blast of honey aroma can cause great excitement with consequential robbing

As an afterthought; how pleasant it is to work with such well behaved bees. Queen selection and rearing means that usually, I can do a brood-box inspection with just one or two puffs of the smoker.

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