With the spring well and truly advanced and the Oil seed rape, (Colza), flowering in the fields locally I finally managed to get the last of the “honey supers” on yesterday and breathed a sigh of relief - just in time, always at the last minute.
Once the temperature exceeds about 15 – 16°C Oil seed rape
produces sufficient nectar to create what bee keepers call “a flow” and at this
point Honey bees will go totally crazy for it and will travel past all the
other sources of nectar such as plum, cherry, apple and blackthorn to reach it,
sometimes by several kilometres.
The introduction of spring flowering rape has been one of
the major changes both in the French countryside and for honey bees in the last
20 / 25 years with production in 1985 of 1.4 million tons, 1995 of 2.8 million
tons, 2005 of 4.5 million tons and 5.5 million tons in 2012. The change is so great in the areas where it
is grown that it has completely altered the behaviour of bees in spring and
weather conditions permitting can provide a yield of 10 to 20 kg of rape honey
per hive by the end of April and may also result in colonies swarming earlier
in the season which is either desirable or not depending on the keepers point
of view. Personally as someone that let’s their bees swarm, (and hopefully
captures most of them), I think it’s beneficial and allows for a longer period
of colony build up with correspondingly greater summer yields and colony
strength.
One downside is that the crop itself can have moderate to
severe health implications for some people ranging from breathing difficulties,
coughing and sneezing to severe headaches.
Anyone that has been near the crop when it’s flowering will have been
aware of the powerful perfume that fills the air.
The downside for the bee keeper is that due to the small
size of the sugars in rape honey it sets rapidly becoming hard even in the hive
and must be removed and extracted rapidly ideally before the rape has finished
flowering, which brings us to something else. While the rape is flowering and
temperatures are high enough the bees will work furiously and be generally very
happy and pleasant natured, or perhaps just too busy to waste time with any
human interference. When the rape stops flowering and the flow finishes there
is often something of a forage gap with little to fill it other than perhaps
Acacia in a good year, consequently the bees can become quite bad tempered for
a while.
Back to the rape honey, as mentioned it sets rapidly and is
also very hard, however by stirring and remixing it will soften and is then
sold as “creamed honey” or “miel crémeux” in French. If left hard in the tub or
jar it is easy to soften with a knife when used.
It’s also very pale, often almost white as can be seen in the photo; to state the obvious it’s the pot on the left.
It’s also very pale, often almost white as can be seen in the photo; to state the obvious it’s the pot on the left.
Chris