So we are done and dusted for another season, the honey is off and the bees are settled, all that remains is to complete Autumn treatments and tuck the bees away for another Winter. Seasons don't seem to last very long any more.
We seemed to wait ages this year before we opened any hives and then we had weeks and weeks wondering if the rain would ever cease but the bees still had the remnants of their Winter stores to see them through this miserable period. Nothing stops the bees and I knew they would be building and would go through their routine, rain or no rain and as expected, the cells began to appear by the end of April or early May. I really don't mind this as I find these early queens have always been reliable and the honey crop is rarely affected, nothing worse than a colony hitting swarm mode just as Summer is about to start.
At my friend's apiary he had a raft of failed matings which we were able to fix with a few nice virgins from cells harvested at the farm apiary and here I had my star colony for the year, a colony headed by a 2023 Amm. Despite having eighteen frames of brood and bees removed to create nucs, they were still a large colony and made 148 lbs of honey and the four new queens they provided are now heading their own colonies.
We sold a few colonies at the start of the year and they all went on to do well apart from one where I had to break the news to the new beekeeper that he had missed a swarm. That was disappointing because I had been through this colony with him earlier on and it was a double brood and heaving with the most docile bees.
The honey crop average was down this year to 71 lbs per production hive, they are currently thumping the Balsam and also lots of Ivy pollen going in, a week of half decent weather forecast so I expect the stench of Ivy this week as I treat the hives.
Each year we feed less and less, only the nucs and single boxes have had a feed and this is just a small slurp of half a gallon to make up for losing their supers.