Problem: Too Much Honey!

We hope all our readers have been enjoying a relaxing summer without too much to think about, where all the decisions have been easy ones to make. It goes without saying that we have been as busy as our bees, checking that our colonies are healthy.  Even the very hands-off approach of just observing their comings and goings can tell us that they are doing what they are supposed to do: making more bees and making honey! We are pleased to report that our colonies are thriving and have been foraging on the abundance of nectar-rich plants in the area. For the first time since we have been beekeeping in France, we moved one of our colonies to another location to help some farmer friends with pollination. The fact that they have hundreds of hectares of sunflowers was also a deciding factor in our participation in ‘transhumence’. It’s an activity carried out by many commercial beekeepers, where hives are moved to different areas so that pollination is improved and different types of honey can be produced. Our colonies usually provide us with ‘miel de fleurs’, mixed flower honey, as we grow lots of different plants, but the colony that we have moved will be making sunflower honey, a first for us.

The honey that we harvest from our bees is always ‘surplus honey’. It’s important to remember that bees don’t make honey for us, but to feed themselves over the winter. Throughout the active season (when temperatures are consistently above 14c) forager bees will be collecting water, pollen for their young, and nectar to feed the adult bees. Not all nectar is turned into honey as a lot of it is eaten straight away, but any surplus will be treated with an enzyme to remove the majority of the moisture, and stored under a wax cap : honey. Bees are hard workers, and if the weather is good and there is plenty of forage available, they will collect it. There doesn’t appear to be a point where they say “That should do, we can take it easy for a bit, we’ve got enough now”, they just keep collecting and storing. Happy days for us as, provided we leave them with enough honey for winter (around 20kg), we can harvest the surplus.

So, what is ‘too much honey’ and why can it be a problem?

When a hive is ‘honey bound’ it means that the bees have collected so much nectar that they have started to store it in the brood nest, taking up space that would normally be used by the queen to lay eggs. Bees work hard and are constantly foraging, and if there is a lot of nectar available they will carry on hoarding as their instinct is to store as much as they can against leaner times in the future. When there is a ‘honey flow’, which means that there are no shortages of forage options, usually in late spring and summer when everything is flowering, then the bees will need space in which to store surplus honey. In a traditional, vertical hive, the beekeeper can help by placing another box, a ‘super’, on top of the main box which contains the brood (the baby bees), the queen, and the majority of the bees. Often a plastic or metal grill will be placed between the brood box and the super, and this has holes in it which are too small for the queen to pass through. This then acts as a ‘queen excluder’ and prevents the queen from laying eggs in the super frames. The bees will then store nectar here, which will become surplus honey that can be harvested when it is fully capped. Any honey that is stored in the brood box will be for winter stores and should not be harvested.

That’s what should happen in a traditionally managed hive. However, if the beekeeper finds that most of the frames in the brood box have been given over to storing honey at a time when the bee population should be growing at a rate of knots, then action sometimes needs to be taken. It is critical that the queen continues to lay in late summer and early autumn as the bees that develop at this time will be ‘winter bees’, slightly modified to survive for a longer period of time to get the colony through to the spring. If the queen has no space in which to lay these winter bees, then there won’t be enough bees to survive the winter. By replacing the frames of honey with frames containing just foundation wax, and by removing the queen excluder, the beekeeper can encourage the bees to use the space for brood. The honey can be fed back to the bees over the winter so they won’t starve.

Proactively helping the bees to manage themselves is part of an ‘interventionist’ or hands-on approach to managing honeybee colonies, but it certainly isn’t the only approach, and we hope to share a bit more about natural beekeeping in the coming months.