what a rollercoaster year 2026 is turning out to be. This is going to be a bit rambly, sorry.
we started off in early and mid spring with the colonies exploding in size, it was absolutely amazing to see the brood nests expand really quickly and loads of honey coming in nice and early.
Next up is the June gap, yes June is my next doors granny, but that's not the gap that we're interested in
.
This is the 2 week gap between the spring flowers finishing and the summer flowers starting. It's very easy to get caught out and that mega strong colony that had 30lb of honey suddenly run out and starve to death.
It's normal for the colonies that are usually placid to get really arsey and make the weekly inspection a real chore and more likely to get a sting or 2. I had 2 colonies that got down to virtually 0 honey but not quite.
The next thing to happen is that the Linden / Lime tree comes into flower - this is normally where most of my honey come from, if it rains in these 3 weeks then I get bugger all, if we have a heatwave then the boxes fill up at a rate that you have to see to believe - and this is where we're at this year and the blackberry is only just getting going
I've run out of honey boxes to put on and so the only thing I can do is extract because when the boxes are full the bees will be prompted to swarm.
3 boxes extracted so far and I've nearly filled my 50Kg settling tank, and there's at least another 10 boxes left to extract.
A bumper harvest is good news for my customers because I can keep my price the same as I have for the last 4 years when I had planned to up the price a little to cover the costs of the new equipment that I've bought this year.
Maybe we shouldn't do the cutting back every year but they've got a bit tall and I'm trying to keep them manageable.
