What We Do
October
The bees are settling down and preparing for winter. Worker bees forage, when the weather is warm enough, for ivy pollen and that of other winter flowering plants. There is very little bee activity outside of the hive.
I've been collecting sloes ready for making sloe gin but have, of course, left some for the local wildlife. Hawthorn berries are also fully ripe and I've collected some of these too to add to a recipe or two... it's always good to experiment!
September
The bees are calming down now and are less frenzied in their foraging activities. There are still many flowering plants for them to visit and I make my final honey collection before winter at the end of the month. The queen may now stop laying and the drones are likely to disappear overnight as they no longer have any purpose in the hive and just eat the precious honey needed for winter stores. As a result the hive population becomes much reduced. Wasps are still hanging around the hives and doing their best to enter to steal honey and grubs, but the guard bees are able to cope with the lower numbers of intruders and wrestle the wasps, one by one, out of the hive.
I've been collecting apples, from friends and from boxes at the side of the road, to make autumnal 'Honey and Apple Chutney'. In a few weeks time it will have mellowed enough to try with a tasty cheese on some freshly baked sourdough bread. Hazelnuts have been raining down in our garden from my three hazelnut trees! I have to share them with the local squirrel and, although he is foraging much earlier than me, he doesn't find them all and I can collect the remaining ones to make spicy 'Dukkha' at my leisure, a favourite topping for avocado on toast with a poached egg!
August
There is less nectar available for the bees in August and so foraging activity slows down. Wasps pesters the bees and try to enter the hives. In the strong colonies, the bees put up a good fight and defend their entrance. Unfortunately, one of my hives has a drone-laying queen and so there are less worker bees to defend the colony. Eventually the wasps gained hold and there was little the remaining bees can do to stop the wasps from taking the grubs and remaining honey.
My tomato plants are dripping with sweet ripe tomatoes and I've been freezing them this year, along with green beans and courgettes, to enjoy them for longer through the autumn and winter!
July
This is the time when, if the weather is good, the main nectar flow will occur. The queen's laying rate drops and so the hive population falls. I have taken off some supers ready for spinning out the honey and have replaced them with empty ones. Once the honey has been spun out of the frames, I put them back out in the garden for the bees to clean out and within ten minutes it's as though a swarm of bees has landed on them! Swarms can still occur in July so I keep an ear out for the hum of hundreds of flying bees and an eye out for dark clusters in the trees around the hives!
I've been picking climbing green beans, lettuces, tomatoes, spinach and so many courgettes!
June
Many of my hives are now full of bees but some of the colonies have started to swarm. This is one beautiful docile swarm that decided to settle in an old tree in the orchard. It was easy to collect and re-home in an unoccupied hive as it was positioned at head height and in a very neat cluster. I have taken off a number of frames from the hives as, recently, the bees will have visited oil-seed rape flowers and the honey produced from the nectar crystalises very quickly. I will use it for cooking especially later on in the year when I make chutneys. In June, there is a deficit in the amount of flowers for the bees to forage and, as a result, the bees can starve. However, this year doesn't seem too bad and the 'June gap' hasn't affected them significantly.
May
I made a very late visit to a wild garlic patch in the woods and collected a large bunch to make 'Cheese and Wild Garlic Scones'. I also collected some to freeze for the winter to bake and remind me that spring is around the corner.
Nectar and pollen are in abundance and the queen is laying at her greatest rate. Bees enter the hive laden with pollen of all different colours from the various flowers they have visited. Our paddock is now a sea of yellow buttercups that will keep the bees busy for a while! When the worker bees bring in pollen I know there is brood in the hive. I collected my first small swarm of the year in early May from a fence post in a nearby village and I re-homed the new colony in a friend's wildflower meadow... what lucky bees!