It was a strange fall. The weather should have promoted a strong honey crop – we had a good mix of warm/sunny with rain, but in the end we missed much of our season over the timing of our key fall harvest flowers.
The big issue in this area seems to be the timing of the aster flowers. They arrived about 2-3 weeks late and much later than it was safe to wait for them prior to harvest. Waiting too long means that the weather could become too cold to do feeding to prepare the bees for winter.
The norm (for me) is to take the harvest by the 1st week of October, and then feed sugar syrup to make up for the bee’s loss of resources in time for cold temperatures.
Despite the poor harvest, we did manage to get some delicious honey out of our bees and with the late aster bloom, the bees loaded up with that and sugar syrup giving most of them the resources to make it through winter. A few failed to take advantage of either the flowers or syrup and will have trouble making it this year. They don’t show signs of disease or high mite count so I’m not sure why they are struggling, though another local BK suggested they had issues with pesticide poisoning in some colonies. Hopefully any winter loss is limited and we can keep our colony numbers at 25-30 as has been our plan over the past few years.
We still have honey! Even with our limited harvest I am hoping to be able continue to supply our community until at least the 1st week in December.
Chris
