Churning out bad news isn’t fun but there is no avoiding the
fact that honey yields continue more or less year on year to reduce in both my part and
many other parts of France .
This has nothing to do with any real or imaginary issues with honey bee populations
but is simply a result of the amount of nectar that is available for any single
bee colony to collect.
These days increasingly large swathes of France
are used for growing cereals where it is the main use of the countryside. I know I’ve said this many times but it’s
fundamental in understanding what is happening with just about every non-woodland
species you can think of being affected and needless to say honey bees are no
exception. As a result of this massive change in the landscape honey bees and their
keepers have become increasingly dependent on a couple of crops to produce surplus
harvestable honey due to the loss of native habitat and related flora. This
isn’t the same as a bee colony having enough for its own survival which it
usually will have but about producing an excess that the bee keeper can remove.
Where I live there are essentially three main possible
sources that can provide harvestable honey or at least the bulk of it. These are Oil seed rape, Sweet Chestnut and
Sunflower but all three are relatively short flowering and subject to weather
conditions being right.
Right conditions in the case of Oil seed rape means a
temperature of 16°C or more with good bee flying weather. As Oil seed rape
usually flowers here in late March / April these conditions are often not met
or perhaps only for a few hours in the afternoon. The flowers last from three
to six weeks depending on the weather, (they will last longer in poor wet
weather). Another issue with Oil seed rape is that the colonies need to have
grown enough to really work the flowers when conditions are right.
The right conditions for Sweet Chestnut are simply long hot dry
days, 20 to 25°C being ideal with a flowering time here usually around the
second half of June / first half of July. Unfortunately in recent years it has
tended to rain a fair amount in this period and heavy rain finishes the flowers
off completely. The flowers last a couple of weeks or just a little longer.
Click on photos to enlarge.
The right conditions for Sunflowers to produce a decent
yield are more complex and depend on both regular rainfalls while they are
growing, then fine weather with a temperature of at least 25°C to produce a
good nectar flow. The flowers last a couple of weeks or just a little longer
and will be in flower between July and September depending on when sown.
Of course some people will have more favourable conditions
and depend less on these three sources if they live in or close to a town,
village or hamlet with an abundance of other flowers within flying range, sadly
not the case for me although mercifully we do have our own three hectares with
quite a lot of bramble and other honey bee flowers.
This year conditions just weren’t favourable for the three
main sources where I live and the result was a honey harvest that produced
about 25% of what it ought to be. Not a disaster personally but worrying as
this is the way the countryside is going and it will lead to commercial
producers quitting in even larger numbers. Crazy because we are continually
being told that there aren’t going to be enough bees to pollinate the crops but
it has to be understood that we need more than the agricultural crops to
sustain our bees unless we are to become like large parts of the USA shipping
the bees round the country in greater and greater numbers and loosing them in
equally large numbers. Recent studies are showing that the best place for bees
and many other species is in peri-urban situations but these are not usually
places where it’s possible to have concentrations of hives.
So thinking positively and working with what I’ve got I’ve
been raising, splitting and planting hundreds, (thousands), more plants in our
fields to increase the quantity of bee / insect friendly flowers which if nothing
else will look nice and provide the variety of nutritional sources that honey
bees need to be healthy and at the same time be beneficial to a whole range of
other creatures.
Chris