Beekeeping is an annual cycle, and the decisions you make — or fail to make — at each stage have consequences that ripple forward for months. This category covers the seasonal rhythm of colony management in the UK: spring build-up and swarm prevention, summer honey production, post-harvest treatment and feeding, winter preparation, and the critical late-season period when the quality of your winter bees is being determined. It also includes the less predictable aspects of British seasons: dearths that arrive at the wrong time, weather that collapses a nectar flow, and autumns that do not behave like autumns.
The emphasis throughout is on proactive management — understanding what the colony needs before it becomes urgent, and planning around probabilities rather than reacting to surprises. Experienced beekeepers will recognise the patterns; newer beekeepers will find these posts useful for building a mental model of how a season actually unfolds in practice.
Why feeding pollen in July might help, and feeding it in September might not Back in March I wrote about honey bee nutrition, and I pontificated (yes, I do that) about the merits of feeding during a dearth. I said that I suspected my bees had suffered nutritional deficits in late summer, that this would … Read more
In recent times, beekeeping seasons have changed for me. Only ten years ago, the idea of swarming in April was preposterous, whereas now it’s normal. The so-called ‘June gap’, a period of little forage between spring and summer blooms, has compressed to almost nothing. For the last few seasons the majority of summer honey is … Read more
Word has reached me through the beekeeping grapevine that colony losses this winter have been high, particularly in the South and East of England. Time will tell whether this plays out, but my information from certain sellers of queens and nucleus colonies seems to support that story. Pre-orders of queens and nucs are skyrocketing. My … Read more
After the hard work of harvesting and extracting the summer honey crop, followed by tidying up the resulting sticky mess, it is rather pleasant to have a little break from beekeeping. We add the pungent pads of Formic Pro to brood boxes at the same time as we remove cleared honey supers, and they are … Read more
Quite a while ago, I remember speaking with Randy Oliver (scientificbeekeeping.com) about some work he was interested in doing to look at pollen substitute bee-feed. He was, at that time, testing some propriety pollen patties and comparing them to natural pollen. Later, he went on to look at the ratios of the essential amino acids … Read more
I can’t remember if we are currently experiencing “fool’s spring”, the “spring of deception“, or some other amusingly named phase, but my bees are certainly enjoying it. In my area—and indeed across nearly all the UK—March provided more sunshine and considerably less rainfall than usual. This delightful situation is bound to change. The only certainty … Read more
I seem to have been quite busy lately, resulting in a lack of blog posts. A cynic might suggest that the real reason is that I have nothing much more to say, or that there are so many sources of beekeeping information nowadays that mine will be drowned out, so what’s the point? Well, the … Read more
Prefer a podcast? https://youtu.be/8S3AAW-ey9E I have returned from a holiday in Lanzarote – the Seaside Hotel Los Jameos Playa as usual – and I’m eagerly awaiting the Beekeeping Show at Telford. Snowdrops and hazel catkins have been out for some time, but there is still a cold bite to the air. It’s tempting to overreact … Read more