Rain, rain, go away…

…Come again another day – maybe overnight during the inevitable heatwave in July, please?! We’ve had quite enough of this wet and cold start to the year, thank you. During the winter months our primary concern is how we can best protect our bees, with insulation and ventilation being of supreme importance. Damp is actually a worse problem to have than cold, as mould and bacteria can thrive and lead to colony health issues. Hives can become damp when condensation forms due to the humidity caused by the bees’ breath meeting cold surfaces (e.g. the underside of the crown-board). It’s astonishing to learn that a colony of bees can produce up to 26 litres of water over the course of the winter months! Even though bees are experts at controlling the temperature of the colony, beekeepers might need to take measures to help provide a healthy environment.

Observations and Optimism

So, 2024, what a year, eh?! How to describe it? I don’t think I’m alone in thinking of it as ‘wet’, and figures released by the UK Met Office, and Météo France, would agree. September was the wettest calendar month in Bedfordshire and Oxfordshire since 1836 (1), and in Paris it was the wettest year since 1886 (2). Beekeepers were presented with a set of problems – and blessings – caused by the excessive amount of rain in the first half of the year, and will take this experience into consideration for the future.

The intemperate weather caused issues with colony increase: swarming behaviour was curtailed, queen matings were compromised, and foraging was limited due to a dearth of nectar. All of these facts have meant that in some areas across the country there has been a poor honey harvest and colonies have not achieved the optimum sizes required for successful over-wintering. However, what has been tough on the bees has had a similar effect on their nemesis, the Asian hornet, and so (with a sigh of relief) beekeepers have not had to deal with the usual heavy predation from these invaders. Trapping mated Asian hornet queens in the autumn before they hibernated was therefore of utmost importance, and we now need to be ready to trap any survivors emerging from hibernation as soon as Spring arrives.

Busy Buzzies!

Without a doubt, September is our busiest beekeeping month – there is so much to do! Don’t get me wrong, Spring wasn’t particularly idle; we had our work cut out managing swarm behaviour and ensuring our colonies were healthy and thriving, but late summer presents other challenges.

A Dadant hive ready to harvest

The bees are very aware of the equinox and reduced hours of daylight, so the race is on to ensure they have foraged for enough nectar to turn into honey for their winter stores. Of course, this is when we turn up, smacking our lips, ready to pinch this honey.

Keeping Busy

“It must be a doddle being a beekeeper in winter, there’s nothing to do!” such is the kind of remark we often hear, but, au contraire, the winter months give us a chance to catch up on lots of jobs. We also still have to care for our bees to ensure that they survive the ‘downtime’ and emerge in the spring as healthily as possible. Just because we don’t see them as often as we do between March and October, that doesn’t mean we can forget about them.

It’s important to ensure that our hives are sound, secure and waterproof, and we have to check for dampness under roofs and on crownboards after any prolonged period of bad weather. If there are any stretches of particularly windy weather then we often place bricks or large stones on the hive roofs to weigh them down, and we know of beekeepers who have hives in exposed positions where strapping them to the stands is a common requirement.

Ready for some R&R?

As the beekeeping season draws to a close you’d like to think that those people ‘of beekeeping age’ (according to The Guardian*, they are “ripped, rugged, with a confident bearing, and have a certain ease in their skin”), could finally think about putting up their feet for a few weeks. Far from it! It’s true that the work involved in keeping bees is less intensive over the winter months, but it is still important. Bees are living creatures, not toys to be packed away until next year, so they need to be looked after even if you don’t actually see them very often.

After the honey harvest, typically for us in September, we treat our colonies for varroa mites, and carry out our final disease inspections to ensure that our bees are as healthy as possible going into the winter. We assess their food stores, and if we feel they are a little low (happily very rarely), we’ll feed them sugar syrup that they can store. In a typical French hive, a viable colony requires around 18-20kg of food to see it through until the Spring when the foragers can start again to gather nectar and pollen in earnest. So, by checking the frames for capped honey and nectar, and by hefting the hives to feel their weight over the following weeks, we can ascertain whether or not they have enough to live on.

Here Comes Spring 2023!

I’m not admitting to being slow on the uptake, but most things in my life tend to be one step ahead of me these days; it must be the recent high temperatures (any excuse…). That fact is definitely true of the bees, but they are several strides in front when it comes to planning.  Forget about already having the Christmas shopping done, they are thinking about next Spring and how the colony is going to build up. As beekeepers we can help them with these preparations, and Autumn is an important time for assessing the health of the queen bee, the size of the colony and the amount of stores they have gathered. 

Dear Diary

“Keeping a diary” seems to be something that most people have done, in one way or another, at some point in their lives. It’s usually as angst-ridden teenagers that we scribbled down incredible insights (hands up those who admit to identifying ever-so-slightly with Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole, aged 13 and three quarters).  Those diaries were always supposed to be secret, but as we got older we didn’t have the time or inclination to retain the habit. Perhaps social media, with its instant access and global reach, has replaced the traditional form of diary-keeping, but there is definitely still a place for old-fashioned observation in the world of beekeeping. Fictional diaries such as ‘The Diary of a Provincial Lady’ (E M Delafield) and ‘Diary of a Nobody’ (G&W Grossmith) are amusing and tell a good story, dealing as they do with the comings and goings of ‘ordinary people’, whereas Samuel Pepys’s Diary and Daniel Defoe’s ‘A Journal of the Plague Year’ are informative and useful in helping us understand life in a definite place and time. The ‘diaries’ or records kept by scientists are even more so, and this is where the link with beekeeping comes in.

When you start your beekeeping life, you may only have one or two colonies and so it will be fairly
easy to remember what’s going on, when and where. Having said that, we have been known to mis-remember things e.g. which queen bee is in which hive, even when there are only two of them! As time goes on, and as the number of colonies rises, remembering becomes more difficult, and so we urge people to get into the habit of record-keeping right from the start. Records are not just for checking what you did last time you did a hive inspection, but they are essential when you want to look at performance – colony build-up, productivity (bees and honey), resistance to disease etc.

What is a bee's favourite take-away food?

When the weather isn't great, it seems unfair that bees have to go looking for their food when the rest of us have so many easier options... (well some options for those of us living in rural France!).  As Spring approaches though, things on the food front do change for the better for our girls and as more plants and trees start to come to life, the range of pollen and nectar available grows which means a varied diet and (hopefully) healthy young bees.

We have a challenge for the eagle-eyed this week!  How many different 'take-aways' are the bees bringing back to their hives where you are?  Or, how many different colours of pollen can you see on the bees' back legs, just flying around the garden?

Someone's hungry: reassuring 'Proof of Life' in our hives

We all know that the winter months can be quite nerve-wracking for beekeepers: will the bees survive? are the hives insulated properly? do they have enough stores to see them through to the spring? We do what we can, placing foam inside the roofs, or installing quilt boxes, and we heft the hives to calculate the amount of honey they have left, but we don't really know what's going on inside. On sunnier warmer days a few bees may venture out to see what forage is around (and to have a quick poo!) and it's heartwarming to see pollen being taken into the hive at this time of year. 

I was especially encouraged though to see "proof of life" (or at least proof of stores being raided!) when I slid out the bottom board of one of our hives today. As you can see in the photo above, lines of wax cappings have fallen from the frames where the bees have been uncapping the honey stores, showing that they have been accessing the food in great quantities. I have to be vigilant that they don't run out of food too soon and so have added some extra candy over the feeder hole in the crownboard, but I am happy to know that there are a lot of bees in this colony and they are all actively feeding. Fingers crossed for the next few weeks!