The audio version (listen rather than read) is on the podcast page
Overall, the 2024 beekeeping season ended up being fairly average for me in terms of honey production. The weather conditions were quite challenging in the spring and early summer, but, as is often the case, things turned around by the end. Nevertheless, as always, some things went wrong. My beekeeping record-keeping has evolved (or perhaps regressed?) over the years, but I’ve always been able to review my season and get a good sense of what went right or wrong. So, without further ado, here’s what went wrong in my 2024 beekeeping season.
Starvation
The dreadful spring weather seemed destined to cause a complete absence of a spring honey crop. Just as I was about to run out of stored honey—which would have meant I couldn’t supply my customers—a brief window of warmer, drier weather arrived, lasting about ten days. We eagerly harvested this crop, leaving a partially filled/uncapped super for most colonies. Then the weather turned grim again, and most of my bees quickly became hungry.
Within just a couple of weeks, I lost several colonies to starvation. This was entirely my fault, though it’s the first time it’s happened in many years. I took immediate action once I realised the situation. I ordered a load of frame feeders (thanks to Gwenyn Gruffydd), explaining the urgency, and they arrived quickly. We immediately put them to use. While some colonies were doing fine in certain locations, hives in other places were very light, queens stopped laying, brood was being cannibalised, and they were on the brink of collapse.
We fed the colonies using the frame feeders, which hold about two litres of syrup, over the course of about two weeks, returning every few days to refill them. The syrup was Invertbee, diluted to approximately a 1:1 ratio (sugar:water), with a little thymol added (dissolved in alcohol). The bees quickly recovered, the weather improved, and many colonies were likely saved. Considering I had taken most of their honey, it was the least I could do. Not my finest hour.
Mating Boxes
Once again, Mole and I worked through our queen rearing process using an assortment of mating boxes—roughly a 50/50 split between Kielers and Mini-Plus. This was the last straw for the Kielers. We won’t be using them again. While they do work, they’re a hassle compared to the Mini-Plus hives, which we much prefer.
The weather wasn’t kind to us, so our first grafting day wasn’t until 8th June, and the last was on 15th August. This season, I decided to mix things up a bit and used different breeder queens instead of our usual Buckfast type. We mainly grafted from an older (Yellow dot) dark Jolanta queen and an instrumentally inseminated queen from Northumberland Honey, which was almost pure Apis mellifera mellifera (Black Bee). I thought it was time for a change. The Jolanta queen had been a good honey producer, but her colonies didn’t perform particularly well early in the season; they only really thrived later, delivering a big summer crop. Her workers were a bit feisty, but I decided it was worth the risk.
Regardless of how our newly made queens perform next season, one thing we do know is that the Mini-Plus hives worked brilliantly for us once again. We overwinter several of them as triple or quadruple brood boxes, with the top box full of honey. In the spring, we can split them into single boxes, each with bees, brood, and stores—an ideal environment for our first queen cells of the season.
The Kielers, on the other hand, require a lot of winter maintenance. We have to scrape them out and sterilise them, and we essentially start from scratch in early summer. This involves shaking bees, storing them in a cool room for 3-4 days, and all that jazz.
Kieler nucs demand a lot of attention because they’re so small. They can quickly run out of food in bad weather, and they can just as easily become overcrowded and swarm when the weather is good. I understand why they’re effective in larger-scale queen production setups, but from now on, we’re 100% committed to the Mini-Plus system. Although they aren’t compatible with our other equipment, we can live with that. I’ve ordered more Mini-Plus hives from Germany.
Queen Problems
In 2024, I changed my cell-building setup, using a strong double-nucleus colony instead of my usual giant colonies—similar to what Mike Palmer does. Next year, I’ll return to my usual method, as I’m more familiar with it, though we did reasonably well with the double-nucleus system.
Our first issue of the year was that the larvae we grafted early on weren’t floating in the large puddles of jelly that I like to see at the bottom of their cells. They weren’t being fed as well as I’d have liked, which made grafting more difficult, and the success rate (‘take’) was lower than usual (50% compared to 80%+). I think this may have led to problems with queen acceptance and early supersedure. Lesson learned: it’s essential to only graft well-fed larvae with lots of jelly.
Once the weather improved, things went smoothly from a queen-rearing perspective. However, we then faced another issue—poor queen mating in our production colonies. These were colonies that had attempted to swarm and were left with a single queen cell (we clip queens, so we didn’t lose bees, just the old queen). Normally, the virgin queen emerges, mates, and starts laying within a month of removing the other queen cells. This season, however, we found that mating wasn’t happening, which resulted in drone-laying queens. The majority of my colony losses were due to drone-laying queens, laying workers, or missing queens, which all stemmed from mating issues.
Yes, we did lose a couple of swarms, but mostly we caught things in time.
The final queen problem we encountered this season was the failure of queen introductions, even in some nucleus boxes. It was worse than usual, though generally we’ve had a good success rate in the past. I’m not sure whether this was due to the darker queens not being accepted by the lighter-coloured workers or something else. As usual, when I took the time to use a push-in cage, it worked fine. The problems always arise when we use those plastic travel cages, even after changing the cage and removing the attendant bees. It wasn’t a huge issue, but this year was the worst I can remember.
A Good Season Anyway
In conclusion, despite the problems outlined above, we still had a pretty good season overall. We sold nucs, raised queens, and produced a decent honey crop (over 80 lbs per colony). We had an excellent crop of lime honey (Linden or Basswood) from one site, which has now completely sold out. Clearly, people love it!
Oh, and this was the first season with the new van. It’s been a game-changer—so much more space, and it’s 4WD.
Now, it’s time to make some candles…