Common beekeeping questions

When do bees produce honey?

When do I harvest honey?

How many times do I harvest honey in a year?

All the above questions are commonly asked by people who want to join beekeeping after getting excited by the trainings or news they get from beekeepers.

Well from my point of understanding, all the questions mean one thing or I summarise them into one statement and this is: A beekeeping calendar.

With the beekeeping calendar, the following are considered:-

1.      Climate

2.      Colony population and strength

3.      Floral blossoms

Climate the general weather conditions usually found in a particular place ie dry or wet [rainy season or drought]. Therefore during the wet weather, there is rainfall which brings water to provide nourishment to plants which grow and produce flowers. And during the dry weather condition, all the plants are affected and usually there is no growth and no flowers but not to all plants though.

So this element is very important to consider when you are keeping bees.

Colony population is the total number of bees available in a single hive. Usually a strong bee hive should contain roughly 50,000 bees and on average depending on the size of the beehive since a bigger hive contains more bees and a small hive contains less bees.

Therefore the more bees available in a beehive ensure a big accomplishment of activities in the hive which include collecting nectar to produce honey.

So during the nectar flow, more bees will store more honey and lesser bees will store less honey and the less honey will almost be for the new born babies leaving the beekeeper with nothing to harvest! But a strong and big colony will collect a lot of nectar and store a lot of honey enough for the babies that will hatch and surplus for the beekeeper to harvest.

The last thing to note here is the condition of the hive. Bees with a lot of troubles from pests, leaking hive and diseases could not perform to your expectations!

Blossom. When a tree or plant blossoms, it produces flowers before producing fruits which can be eaten by man and this is what bees need to collect nectar which they store to produce honey. Therefore bees collect nectar from flowers; “where there are no flowers, there is no nectar and no honey in the end”. During the flowering stage, bees visit the flowers everyday to collect nectar to store in the comb cells which turns into honey after a series of processes. Normally honey is available towards the end of flowering or two weeks after flowering season (well capped honey).

Want honey? Wait for flowers to provide nectar for your bees to process honey for you.

 

Calendar

Since we have seen the elements to bring together to understand a bee-keeping calendar, now let us make one.

A calendar is made up of 12months.

 

Month

Jan

Feb

Mar

Apr

May

June

July

Aug

Sept

Oct

Nov

Dec

Climate

dry

dry

dry/wet

wet

wet

wet

dry

Dry/wet

wet

wet

wet

Dry

Blossom

No/yes

no

no

yes

yes

No/yes

no

no

no

yes

yes

no

Activity

Food/ nectar

food

Build -up

Build-up

Collect nectar

food

food

Build-up

Build-up

Collect nectar

food

food

Honey

no

Yes/no

No/yes

no

no

yes

yes

No/yes

no

Yes/no

yes

no

Key:

A. Climate

Dry – no rainfall at all

Wet – there is rain

No/yes – Rainfall starts

B. Blossom [flowers which provide nectar and pollen to bees]

Yes - means the flowers are available

No - means there are no flowers

Yes/no - means there could be some flowers or not depending on the climate and availability of some plants like coffee, mangoes which flower during the dry seasons.

C. Activity [the bees are involved in]

1. Food – bees collect food from fields for themselves. They don’t store it since it is not enough and remember there are few or no flowers.

2. Collecting nectar

During this period, bees are collecting a lot of nectar to store and produce honey. And this is due to a lot of blossom in the fields and nourished plants by rainfall. Usually when there is enough nectar for bees to collect, the queens also lay a lot of eggs to produce more bees which sometimes leads to “swarming” when the population becomes too big to fit in the existing nest.

3. Build – up. During this period, the queen lays a lot of eggs to rear new bees to replace the lost number during the long dry period and also to produce more workforces.

D. Honey

No – No honey

Yes – There is honey

Yes/no – could be some honey depending on the blossom and climate ie coffee flowers could be available to provide some nectar.

Summary

Bees do their activities depending on the weather condition. When there is no enough nectar in the fields (dry period) the queen stop laying eggs to produce new bees. So when rain start, after a couple of weeks; plants are nourished, crops are grown and eventually they start to blossom and the bees will begin visiting the flowers to collect pollen and nectar. At this stage, the queen will start to lay eggs to produce more bees to restore the declined population and workforce and this phase is normally called the build-up phase.

Hey!! Know we are honey thieves because the bees store honey as their food to eat during drought and feed their new born babies. So keep inspecting your bees to see when they have honey and if you find enough for the bees and you then you walk with it.