Winter 2024/5

2024 has been a difficult year for beekeepers in my area. It is generally thought that changeable weather patterns were the problem. We had a warm February and a cold April. It snowed quite heavily on 23 April and that destroyed the flowers of the Erable (French Maple) trees next to my hives. This meant no early spring harvest in 2024.

I moved on and created 9 new queens and got to a total of 20 colonies up at Coursegoules where I keep my hives. I still was able to harvest honey five times during the year and was pleased to find each harvest produced honey of different flavour and texture. I ended up with a similar quantity of honey as usual although about 20% down but there were a number of beekeepers who had no or very little honey.

One of the real pleasures for a beekeeper or at least for me, is to watch the bees at the time of the winter solstice. This happens around 21/23 December. A few days before the solstice the bees are still in their winter cluster and doing very little apart from keeping the queen warm and feeding. Days after the solstice the bees will have broken out of their cluster and are running around the hive preparing for the up coming spring. In about a month, say the first week of February the bees are much more active and are flying and bringing in pollen. Where they get it from is a mystery to me as there does not seem to be a flower anywhere. They are not bringing in much but the fact that it is happening indicates that the queen has started laying again. Another indication is that there are more bees and there is increased activity in the hive. For a beekeeper this could be a dangerous time, as the weather improves and more and more activity is seen at the hive entrance but should the weather get cold again the bees could easily run out of food and starve to death.

Watching the queens for the next couple of months as they increase colony size will be huge fun. Each week as I visit and watch development of the colony until I can extract a frame of fresh eggs in order to create a new colony. This process will hopefully happen about 10 or more times so I can get up to the required number of colonies.