Spring 2024 Beekeeping Report

I have been able to do some actual beekeeping recently, which is a wonderful thing. Suddenly, the Mole (my son, Alex) and the Walrus are back in the game; we have been reversing boxes, cleaning/changing floors, and marking/clipping queens. The land is boggy and wet, but the bees are mostly strong and raring to go. Here is the spring 2024 report:

Wet and Warm

After a pretty average January, we have had a wet and mild February and March. This meant that we ended up feeding the majority of our colonies, which is unusual for me. I had initially been using bakers fondant, then some Lyson Apikand, as I had purchased boxes from Abelo anticipating needing some food. Once that ran out, I grabbed some Apipasta Plus from Paul Beardmore at Modern Beekeeping. Both contain both protein and carbohydrate, which definitely gave colonies a brood-boost. I was amazed at how much they loved the Apipasta, even though it does not contain pollen (the Apikand does). I shall be using that one again, for sure.

Strong Colonies & Some Losses

Most of my colonies in both nucleus and full-sized hives have come out of winter strong. I have not quite got around all of my apiaries yet, due to one being on the far side of a field which is like a rice paddy. However, so far, the losses have been eight colonies from 74, which is 11%. Five of the losses were nucs and three were full-sized. All had either no queen or a drone laying queen. I suppose they must have been failed supercedures – where the newly made virgin queen failed to get properly mated.

First Inspections

Having gone through all the colonies that I can get to, I’m pleased to report that most are either medium-sized or strong. I think I would break them down as:

Small: 5 (8%)

Medium: 30 (45%)

Strong: 31 (47%)

I also found more supercedure queens than I was expecting. Previously I have shared that, based on autumn inspections, I had eight yellow-dot queens, which would need replacing about now (with spares that over-wintered in mini-plus hives). I haven’t checked them all, but so far, only one of those old queens remains. The rest have new queens which I have now marked (red) and clipped. All have good brood patterns. Several of my red-dot queens have also been changed by the bees. They get up to all sorts in the autumn when I’m not really looking into the brood boxes very much.

Reversing boxes

When we do our first inspections, we ideally change the floor for a nice clean one or, at the very least, clean up the one they have as best we can. I like to see clean floors, but occasionally, they are quite mucky. One of my great pleasures in winter is making new floors in my little garden shed; it’s a pleasant break from sitting at my desk. Mine are the under entrance type with a mostly solid floor – good for keeping out mice and wasps.

Furthermore, in the cases where we had supers on the floors over winter, spring is the time when we put the brood box on the floor and the super on top, over a queen excluder, assuming the colony is strong. The few double-brood colonies were also reversed, but I’m not looking forward to lifting the upper boxes once they are full of honey. That’s why the Mole is useful – he is 28 years younger than me.

What’s next

Our next visits will be all about equalising colony strengths at an apiary level, and adding supers. I have sold a few nucleus colonies already, and hope to offload some more at an auction towards the end of April. Last year, they sold for around £225 per nucleus colony, with some going for £250. My guess is that it will be about the same again. I wonder if there might be fewer new beekeepers these days though, given how costly it can be to get started. My nuc sales so far have been to beekeepers with some experience who lost bees over the winter

Re-Queening Works

I expect that most beekeepers who have several apiaries find that sometimes the bees at one particular apiary go a bit horrid. Last season one of ours got selected for inspection by a bee inspector and, of course, he picked the one apiary where our bees were a little more ‘lively’ than we would prefer. As it turned out, they were not too badly behaved, and no disease was found.

Anyway, this apiary of evil bees got re-queened at the end of last summer. I was expecting to find that most of the newly introduced queens had been killed, and replaced by nasty ones, but we found them to be little angels. The new queens are still there, and the bees are happily going about their business, ignoring the beekeepers, apart from to occasionally wave and say, “Dude, just relax, okay?”.

Cleaning Up Mating Boxes

Another job on my list is to clean up all of our Kieler mating boxes and soak them in bleach. The frames need to be returned to pristine condition or replaced, so that when I start to make queen cells in late May (weather permitting) everything is clean and safe. I can’t wait for that time of the season, but for now, it’s scraping and sterilising. In July, I’m hosting a visit by the local beekeeping association members, and hope to show them lots of queen rearing activities. I shall have to tidy up so that they think I’m organised and efficient (I’m not).

Creamed Honey

Oh yes, one other thing I have been doing this spring is using my honey creamer/liquefier that I purchased second-hand off a friendly local bee farmer. It is a beast. The honey that comes out of that thing is so smooth and delicious – I’m really pleased with it, as are my customers. I actually sold out of soft-set honey at the farmers’ market last Sunday, so I have a 50 kg batch on the go right now. The last batch took ages to actually set (about two weeks) but it was worth the wait.

Mark My Words

I have a feeling, deep in my walrus waters, that we might have a good spring honey crop this year. We just need a week or two of sunshine (is that too much to ask?) and nectar will flood in. Ideally, that would be in early May. Surely, after all the recent rain, we are due a spell of sunshine.