Another beekeeping season is nearly behind us, and what a season it's been!  Somehow we've completely neglected the website - sorry about that.

Beekeeping isn't just about honey of course, but it is one reward for all our hard work.  2023 was a strange year for our bees: instead of the colonies building up in the spring, nearly all of them decided to swarm or replace their queen at exactly the wrong time. Then the poor summer weather meant we weren't able to gather a crop of honey for the first time in 14 years of beekeeping.  Our girls had enough honey to get them through the winter but no surplus for us.

In complete contrast, 2024 has been our best year ever and many local beekeepers say the same.  The timing of sun, rain and flowering plants & trees has all come together in textbook fashion.  Our "local honey for sale" signs are out in the front garden and we are delighted to see our regular customers again.

What else has happened in our beekeeping world?  We've collected swarms from various places around the neighbourhood including one in a BT footway box - who says honeybees don't nest in the ground?  We've helped two new beekeepers to get started and have given them the statutory warning: two hives is never enough!  We met the general public at the Suffolk Show beekeeping tent and were impressed by many people's level of knowledge about pollinators and the vitally important role they play. 

Our colonies are now starting to prepare for autumn.  They have plenty of honey and pollen in the hives and they are making the most of the ivy which has come into flower.  They are perfectly happy to gather ivy honey as a late season crop, and good luck to them.  Most people find its taste utterly horrible.  If you're one of the few who like it, I'm sure you will find a beekeeper to sell you some.  Don't ask us though!

So as summer slips into autumn, we look forward to whatever nature has in store.  Meanwhile we will be busy filling honey jars and applying labels, rather a lot of them to do but no complaints....

It's a lovely sunny day and our garden is gradually waking up.  The winter honeysuckle is covered in blossom, the first hellebores & crocuses are open and the snowdrops are springing up in the flowerbeds.  Best of all, our beehives are literally buzzing!  After their long winter indoors, the foraging workers are busy fetching pollen and nectar for the new season's brood.  Beekeepers are always anxious at this time of year - have the colonies survived?  There's no better sight than workers returning laden with fresh pollen.

There's another important task for some of the foragers - fetching water so they can dissolve and eat the ivy honey that they gathered last autumn.  It sets rock-hard in the hive, but that's no problem now that they can make the trip to the margins of our garden pond and drink their fill.

Of course there's a long way to go before spring is here.  We have to keep checking the weight of the hives, and if necessary  give the bees a boost of sugar in the form of fondant.  This is a soft white paste, made with glucose and fructose syrup, that we can put on top of the hive under the roof.  The bees will eat it if they need it even in cold weather.

We don't know what this season will bring, but we can be confident that our colonies are in good shape to start the year.

Here we are in late August and the beekeeping year is almost complete.  How's it been for our girls?

We took three hives to Falkenham Marshes after Easter with very mixed results.  One colony decided to swarm, so we had lots of faffing about and no honey from them.  The other two were right next to a field of Oilseed Rape which should have resulted in lots of lovely delicate honey, but in practice we harvested very little.  Maybe the farmer was growing one of the new new varieties which give high crop yield but low nectar?

Back home things went much better.  Our colonies on the smallholding produced a huge crop of summer honey.  There are big bramble thickets nearby so bramble nectar is very likely to be a big constituent in the mix, boosted no doubt by lavender, rosemary, borage and even a field strip of Phacelia which Bidwells obligingly grew near Searsons Farm.  It was certainly the source of the dark purple pollen which we and other nearby beekeepers saw in our hives.

So our white "Honey for Sale" signs are out in the front garden and the neighbours are ringing our doorbell.  We don't aim to make a profit but it's good to know that we should cover the costs of our beekeeping this year despite the inevitable rise in the price of everything.  As an example, the Formic Pro strips that we use to treat our colonies for the nasty Varroa mite now cost well over a fiver each.  They were under £4 a year or two ago.

Now we just have to make sure our colonies are well fed and healthy as they prepare for winter.  Have they got young vigorous queens?  Yep.  Now that we've taken the honey, have they got enough stores to see them through to spring?  Too early to judge, but we've stocked up on sugar syrup and will feed them during the autumn if they are short.  Are their hives in good condition with no holes or gaps for the wasps to get in and steal the honey?  I reckon so.

Before we know it, the autumn season of Association meetings will be upon us.  Beekeepers are a very sociable bunch and we all look forward to getting together in a village hall, sharing stories of the year's ups & downs over a cuppa.  Meanwhile the bees carry on with their preparations, rearing the new generation that will see them through the harshest of winters.  Perhaps they will welcome the lack of botheration by those pesky humans!

Here we are at the start of another beekeeping season, and already it's the Easter Holidays.  The last two years have flown by with Covid lockdowns and life generally getting in the way of this blog, but I'm pleased to report that we and our bees are alive and well!

We started this season with nine colonies.  We've donated one to Andy, a new beekeeper in our village whom we are mentoring.  It's not a simple job to move a colony when their new home is less than a kilometre away - honeybees can fly up to 5km in search of forage and find their way home.  If we moved them in one go, we'd have a large number of bees back in our garden the next day wondering where their hive has gone!  So they went off to another beekeeper a few km away and spent a fortnight in his garden before we returned them to Andy's new site.

Three of our colonies have gone on their Easter holidays, though actually they will be hard at work.  We were offered the chance to put them next to a field of oilseed rape at Falkenham Marshes.  OSR, as we call it for short, is a wonderful crop for the bees, producing huge amounts of pollen and delicious honey.  Our local farmer doesn't grow it round here so we leaped at the opportunity!  With a bit of luck and kind weather they will produce a surplus of honey in the next few weeks.  We will have to look sharp though - OSR honey crystallises very quickly in the comb and then we can't extract it.

We are waiting for the phone to start ringing with swarm callouts.  Beekeepers elsewhere in Suffolk have already reported swarms so we can expect to be kept busy.  Swarm collection is great fun, meeting the public and helping to spread the word about bees.  You could say it gives us a real buzz!

Oh dear, it's 2020 already - where did last year go?  That's just history as far as the bees are concerned, or perhaps they just live in the present and have no concept of history.  If that's the case, though, how do the virgin queens and drones know where to find each other and do the business?  They meet in the same places, "drone congregation areas", every year even though they are only a few weeks old and haven't been shown the way.  clever, that!

Yes, it's swarming season.  Some beekeepers think swarming is a big problem and to be avoided at all costs.  They clip the queen's wing so she can't fly away - she lands in the grass and may or may not manage to crawl back home.  Meanwhile all the flying bees return to the hive, wait for a few days until the first new queen hatches and then off they go again.  Bees evolved the swarming instinct many millennia ago and it has served them well.  The ice ages restricted the European bee populations to a few sites around the Mediterranean, but as soon as the glaciers retreated and plant life flourished the bees were there thanks to swarming.

It does keep us beekeepers on our toes though.  One of our hives has looked really promising this year with lots of bees and a young queen who was laying like billy-oh.  She's one of the queens we reared last year from our best colony, chosen because they were both productive and placid - the latter being a high priority when you keep bees in your back garden!  We had a plan to rear some more queens from her this year.

We'd inspected them on 23rd April and all looked well, with lots of space for the queen to lay and supers for the workers to store the nectar.  May started cold and wet, so it was the 2nd before we could check them again.  Yes, that's 9 days later - very significant.  And what did we find?  Half a dozen queen cells with big fat larvae almost ready to be sealed and pupate into new queens.  Lots of empty polished brood cells which the queen hadn't laid in; and her majesty stolling about without a care in the world.  My, she looked fit and ...ah... ready to fly??  If we'd left it just one more day, they'd have sealed the queen cells, packed their bags and set off with the queen for their Big Adventure.  Oh bother, we'd have said, and other such words.

Half an hour later we'd swapped bees, frames and boxes around and split the colony into four.  The queen is in a nucleus box with some house bees, hopefully getting back into lay, we've got two more nucs with queen cells on the point of hatching, and we left just one queen cell in the original hive so fingers crossed the flying bees will stay put.  Maybe they've done us a favour and we won't have to rear more queens after all.

The end of August is traditionally the finish of the beekeeper's year.  The bees have gathered their honey, the new queens have settled down and there's a bit of a lull.  Or so I'm told!
We've been busy extracting our summer harvest from the combs.  We weren't sure if the long hot dry summer would reduce the crop, but if anything it's bigger as plants & trees have rushed to produce nectar.  So far we've extracted about 130kg of honey (that's over 280lb if you use the traditional British beekeeping weights & measures).  A good result from 6 productive hives and there's still more there.  We may leave it for the bees though, they have certainly earned it.
We checked the varroa levels in our colonies and got a very strange result: 7 of them are almost free of the mites while the 8th needs immediate treatment.  Other beekeepers are reporting much the same.  We don't know why, especially after last year's huge infestations - maybe this summer's heat was a factor?
So it's nearly September and the start of the new year.  The queens should start laying more eggs which the colony will raise as winter bees.  They have a different metabolism from the summer workers with bodily reserves of fat to see them through the next six months.  And what of the drones?  Well boys, there's good news and bad news.  Good news: you've made it this far, albeit without getting your chance to mate with a virgin queen and die in the act.  Bad news: your sisters will throw you out of the hive to die when it turns cold.  Disposable genes eh?
If the hives are low on winter stores we will feed them sugar syrup to replace the honey we stole.  This sounds unkind, but it's only a food supplement; they still have plenty of honey and pollen stored in the brood box.  And there's another good reason to give them syrup, because the ivy is just coming into flower and they are gathering its nectar.  Unfortunately ivy honey sets like concrete when it cools, so it's useless as a winter food when they can't fly out and fetch water to dissolve it.  Bees can starve in a hive surrounded by ivy honey.  But if they mix it with syrup it stays soft and available throughout the winter.
There's a hint of coolth in the air now, and the robin in our garden is singing his wistful autumn song.  So the year turns...

The long spell of hot weather has given way to cooler and fresher temperatures.  That will improve the bees' temper and ours.  The nectar flow has all but gone and the wasps have arrived, so we need to start removing the supers and extracting the honey.
We like wasps in the spring.  They collect grubs and pests in the garden, carrying them off to their nest and feeding to their larvae.  These in turn produce honeydew for the adults to consume.  But now their annual lifecycle is nearing its end, with the nests producing one last batch of drone and queen wasps, and the workers start looking for an alternative source of food.  Ooh look, a beehive!  To quote Burglar Bill, "I'll have that!"
A big strong honeybee colony is well able to defend itself from these stripey attackers.  The bees line up in rows outside the hive entrance and fight them off.  But a small or weak colony can be ransacked and wiped out in a couple of days, so we have to reduce the hive entrance to a narrow slot which helps them repel the wasps one at a time.
What news of our Apidea queens?  One is now in a nuc and hopefully doing well, two others have failed and we have to wait for another fortnight to see if the last box has produced a good queen.
Oh yes, and it's time to insert the varroa boards in our hives and monitor the levels of this nasty little mite.  There were very few in June but we have to keep watch - they can build up rapidly as the population doubles every 3-4 weeks.
Never a dull moment, this beekeeping lark!

 A good day's beekeeping today.  We opened the colony that was left alone to requeen itself.  Result!  Her majesty has already laid 6 frames of worker brood, and although it's early days the colony seems to be very well behaved.  She is now sporting a red dot of paint (red is so in this year) and we hope she'll have a long and productive reign.

Mixed results from our Apidea mating nucs.  We have one lovely new queen who is laying well, so she will be installed in a 6-frame nuc very soon.  Another box has some eggs & brood but no sign of the queen - perhaps she and the workers have departed?  We'll wait for another week just in case.  Nothing much happening in the third box, but the fourth has sealed brood and a sealed queen cell.  It seems they waited for the new queen to start laying and then got rid of her.  The excellent Ron Brown book on Apideas says such queen cells can turn out well despite the small number of workers in the box.  We shall see.

The UK's long hot summer has produced a second bumper crop of honey, following our huge spring harvest from oilseed rape and hawthorn.  But it hasn't rained for two months here in East Anglia and everything is drying out.  Will there be any blackberries?  Will the bees cap all the summer honey or start eating it? 

There's only one thing for it: have a nice cup of Darjeeling tea and a few dark chocolate digestive thins.  Perfect!

There's a lot of waiting involved with beekeeping.  Waiting till they cap the honey in the supers so we can extract it.  Waiting till the new queen they decided to rear has started laying.  Waiting a bit more till we see the capped worker brood and know she's a good 'un.  Waiting till we can check the mini-nucs and hopefully find some new queens ready to be introduced to a colony.

There's a wonderful piece of advice we got on our beginners' course: if you're not sure what to do, go and make a cup of tea!  Dash of milk and two digestives please.