A blog, of sorts

October 2024

Well that was quite the ride. A really weird bee-keeping season - quite mixed weather, very odd behaviour by some of my Queens including  disappearing completely (just vanishing on their own, rather than in a swarm with half the hive) when they seemed to have been doing well, a few swarms (2 on the same day!) and an absolutely bumper harvest at the end of it all. This year, after extracting at the end of August, we have ended up with around 300+lbs of honey! Last year? 31lbs! So who knows. I'm not alone in thinking this was an unusual year though - lots of other blogs and writers have also experienced both odd behaviour by the bees (mostly around the development and mating of new Queens) as well as an incredible harvest. 

I started the season with 4 hives, at one point had six, and then went back to 4 again after combining one smaller hive with a Queen-less but strong hive. Six is just too much work! I was spending most of every Saturday or Sunday sorting them out so I will try and keep to 4 next year - fewer if I can manage it. I have said that every year so far. 

Meanwhile I still haven't completely finished extracting and jarring up all the honey. But my family, friends and neighbours have had a lot of what I have already produced and it has gone down very well. 

I've also bought / inherited lots of extra kit at the end of the summer - brood boxes, supers, an extractor - plus some bits and bobs you can use to raise your own Queens, so I may give that a go next summer. The winter months will be spent cleaning down all this new kit plus the stuff I used this season, a dirty job but one that needs doing (it helps prevent disease for one thing). Plus reading about new techniques I have yet to try e.g. for swarm control, and pondering what went wrong and what went right!

But mostly - at the risk of sounding like Jesse's Diets on The Fast Show - I will be eating honey - on my porridge, on my toast and sometimes drizzled over my roasting chicken.  

May 2024

And we're off! The beekeeping season is well and truely up and running. All four hives got through winter unscathed and seem pretty healthy. After a cold and chilly April, May has bought some much needed warmer weather and so the supers (the bits of the hive where the bees make and store honey) are on and filling up nicely. Beekeepers call this a honey flow - there's plenty of forage (blossom), it is calm, warm and sunny, and the bees are doing what they do best! So I am now regularly checking for signs of Queens cells, which is a warning that a swarm will happen (none so far), and just also generally making sure the bees have enough room to grow the nest - the Queen is laying like nobody's business at the moment as the hive builds up to maximum strength (60,000 bees? Although it seems likely it is really significantly fewer bees than that).  So about once a week - never longer than every 9 days - I open them up and have a look. I'm surprised I've not found any Queen cells thus far but they can swarm any time between now and mid-June I think, so still early days. But at this stage of the year I'm still excited and enthused - come September, I'm more knackered! But hopefully by then I'll have some honey to show for my (the bees') labours.

February 2024

So here we are in the depths of winter - even as I type this it is a cold and snowy, sleety, rainy day.  Autumn and the extraction of the honey feels like an age ago. It was in truth a bit of a rubbish year for honey. In 2022 I had 220lbs of honey from my 4 (sometimes5) hives. This year my prediction of 100 lbs was wildly optimistic. I ended up with just over 30lbs! As detailed above I think the bees ate a lot of the honey they made up to June just to get through the lousy summer, but nonetheless I was surpised at the wild variation in yields. That's showbiz I guess. Beebiz?

So by the end of October I was done with the bees for the autumn. I gave them one good feed of fondant (the white icing you get on sticky buns) and left them to it.  Around the 21st December I treated them for Varroa - you drizzle a slightly acidic liquid on to the bees to make the varroa mites drop off. This year it was a more successful go than in previous years when I felt I had basically drowned them. Last weekend I gave them some more fondant.  Much to my surprise all four hives look to be in good shape but February is often the month (I've read) when hives can collapse and die before the spring foraging can get going. But on the basis of what I saw last weekend I'm cautiously hopeful. 

Meantime I need to start to get my equipment cleaned and replenished and ready to go for another season. I probably won't touch the bees again until April, but there are a few things that need doing between now and then, like melting wax from old comb for recycling, cleaning and sterilising queen excluders, building some new frames, buying and building some new bits and bobs...always with the bits and bobs. The temptation is to start interfering with the bees too early but I just need to remember how knackering it can be in May / June when the hives are full of busy bees - and to save my energies for then. 

So some cold nights ahead, spent in the shed listening to football or music as I potter about getting ready for what I hope will be another instructive and successful season. I just need to remember how I managed my swarms last year - as that seemed to work OK - and I'll be fine... 

August 2023

So here we are at the end of my third season of bee keeping (beekeeping?). This year has been a big contrast to 2022, when the long, hot summer contributed to an absolutely bumper crop – around 220lbs. This year at the end of June (also pretty sunny and warm) the supers (where the bees make the honey) were filling up nicely. But July was a complete washout, which meant the bees couldn’t get out as much to forage and bring in supplies. As a result by August they had started tucking into the supplies of honey they had already stored and so now (midway through August), each of the four hives has basically one super that looks OK to harvest, and the rest are very light. We’ll see how the next few weeks go, but at this stage I’d be surprised if we got much more than 100lbs.

Other than that it has been a pretty successful year for my own beekeeping development. I had only one swarm (thanks I think in part to trying a new method of swarm control) and that one I managed to retrieve from next door’s garden. I’ve also found very low levels of varroa in the hives (varroa is a mite that predates on honey bees and is endemic to almost every hive in the UK apart from some of the island colonies you’d find off the coast of Scotland for example). I don’t know if my bees are resistant (less likely), or I am incorrectly testing for varroa (more likely), but as I can’t see any obvious signs of varroa like deformed wing virus, I’m pretty happy.

So the upshot of that is that supplies of delicious Davenport Honey may be limited this year – but hopefully I will have enough to let the neighbours have some as well as the two local shops I supply (HG Beard the Butcher in Bramhall and the Woodsmoor post office). Extraction will happen early in September so I’ll have a better idea then. Updates to follow!