BEEKEEPING COLUMN - Creating a buzz in July
BEEKEEPING COLUMN - Creating a buzz in July
Welcome to the seventh edition of Rubery beekeeper, Jas Payne’s monthly column. Take a fascinating glimpse into the beautiful, industrious and vital role of bees in nature and experience life as an apiarist.
The wonderful thing about beekeeping is that no two years are the same, and bees always find a way to keep us guessing.
By the summer solstice in June, as long as bees have enough space to store nectar they tend to be less inclined to swarm. Not this year, it seems! Across the country there have been many reports of large, late swarms, and beekeepers have been kept busy collecting them, me included.
We’ve enjoyed some warmer weather this month, and the bees have been busy. The supers (the boxes on the hives where bees store nectar and turn it into honey) are getting heavy!
July is the last opportunity for my bees to make and store honey over and above what they consume daily.
Around now, some beekeepers transport their hives miles to heather moorland in the hope that their bees can produce some sought after heather honey, which has a distinct taste and aroma. I’ve yet to find a heather moor close enough to Rubery, but if you know of one, do give me a call!
I need to ensure that I only remove and extract the honey that the bees don’t need to get them through to May of next year; a good sized hive will eat around 30 lbs of honey over the winter months! Being selfish and taking too much would stress the bees. I would then need to feed them sugar to replace their nutrient rich honey – it’s not a fair substitution in my book.
At the moment, as I’m going round checking my hives, I’m making careful note of which ones are performing well, and which ones are struggling, which have young queens, and which have old queens that could fail before, or during the winter.
I use this information to begin combining weak hives together to make stronger ones, and ensuring they all hives have young, healthy queens that are laying well.
The decisions I make now can impact on how a colony thrives – or doesn’t – during the cold winter months. I need to choose wisely for my bees.
