My bees didnt make much honey in this mono-crop agri-landscape this year. Some of the new splits and new swarms didn't even make enough for them selves. So I decided to equalize the colonies by taking some honey comb from the strong and giving it to the weak colonies. Now they all have 8-10 combs for the winter. Still most combs in this years splits/swarms are empty so feeding sugar syrup will be a must if I want them to survive. Next year I will have to find another out-apiary so to spread my colonies. For that I need hives which are migratory friendly. I will have top bar hives only in my apiary on the farm.
I harvested no more than 6 kg of honey so far for our household. 4 kg during the summer and now 2 kg. It makes me sad the fact that our environment is so heavily laden with mono-crops and pesticides, neatly cut road sides, horse pastures (have no flowers) and perfectly mowed lawns. Only the near by town offers some house hold flowers :(
Crush'n'Strain;
You can change to crainer bees instead to take better care of the early forage in your area. they are the fastest in the spring but you cant use them in your small hives.
ReplyDeleteThe crainers are well adapted to early springforage. they are more like "Up as a sun and down as a pancake". I tried them for at least ten years. They are adapted to lots of food in the spring and early summer and not much in the late summer.
But as I told you earlier the most important thing to do is to get bigger hives. If you do ordinary splits in midsummer there will be no honey the most of the years.
I think there should have been an adaption for wild bees to get bigger feral hives as well to handle the varroa mites in our time if they have that possibilities. They lost a lot of resources then they handle varroa in a no treatment system and a bigger colony can bring in more and Its also my believe that they can keep it warmer in the hive to use it against the varroa as well.
I think my neighbour has crainer bees which have very likely mated with my new Queens. I think we should focus more on creating diverse forage for the bees and all pollinators rather than trying to adapt to this damaged agriculture system. By adapting we dont make things better. Sugar feeding is a way of adapting and thanks to it beekeepers do nothing on the local/national/global level to reduce mono cultures and expand Wild forage areas.
DeleteI do splits in May and eventhough my colonies are medium size i have not seen Varroa issues so far