What's flowering as forage in your area

  • Thread starter Curly green fingers
  • Start date
Beekeeping & Apiculture Forum

Help Support Beekeeping & Apiculture Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
Aargh! Just had a walk round fields near to apiary and the **** is well in flower. Only two of my colonies likely to be at a strength to make use of it. Gets earlier every year.
 
Aargh! Just had a walk round fields near to apiary and the **** is well in flower. Only two of my colonies likely to be at a strength to make use of it. Gets earlier every year.

You need to move North young man....the two (now rare) fields of OSR I can find around me are not even 6 inches high yet.
Hazel pollen coming in nicely today on the first decent flying day we have this year and more forecast for this coming week.......hopefully colonies should be strong and ready when it does flower.
 
Blackthorn been in flower for 2 weeks, dandelions, willow and OSR just started,
Glad to say all 10 hives & my Nuc have come through winter and only 2 hives looking a bit weak all taking advantage of what’s on offer
 
The **** around me is about a foot high so some way off and good job to. Plenty of laurel now out.
 
My pollen sub came today, so I put it on to try to stimulate my nucs, which are not looking good. The one that was dwindling had only a few bees in, but queen was there, sucking on some fondant, but did not look good. I put her in a cage with a smear of honey and introduced her to the drone layer colony, which had a good number of bees, but no queen now that I could find.
 
You might probably find the introduced queen will be rejected in favour of resident drone laying queen or alternatively laying workers.
 
I know the chances are slim but there was nothing to lose. One infertile queen of no use and one poorly queen who might just pick up when surrounded by a decent number of workers. No brainer
 
Why not simply swap the positions of the two so the weak one with the queen gets some of the strength from the drone laying colony.
 
Done that with some of my production colonies, however the weak queen had about 10 bees in with her, so my course of action seemed the sensible one, even if a long shot - she did not look great, and the other nuc had only drone brood in a small amount
 
My pair of colonies as a Network rail ROC were busy on the Cherry Blossom flowering very nicely here within the grounds/site compound, chill breeze but warm bright sun as well. Also three or Four differing pollens coming in.
 
Foraging on lugwort right now.
c488cfee59b716aff18abc2e5199d661.jpg
3c16f4a90a258cd961f55f83f305afa3.jpg


Sent from my YAL-L21 using Tapatalk
 
Lovely.
Great pics, Mark.:)

This phone does take a better picture,
First season I've noticed the girls collecting Nectar from lugwort.
There's a lot around this year.. Funny enough it's mainly growing where the willowherb and hb grow later in the season.
 
Never heard of lugwort. Is lungwort another name for the same plant (Pulmonaria sp) which is, I belive, is in the same family as Borage?
 
Last edited:

Latest posts

Back
Top