Beemaster's International Beekeeping Forum
BEEKEEPING LEARNING CENTER => GENERAL BEEKEEPING - MAIN POSTING FORUM. => Topic started by: beemaster on March 03, 2004, 08:42:18 pm
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While working on my 2004 Beekeeping page today, I was doing some quick math and realized that we get nearly 7 months of possible warm weather a year here. That is a very liberal number though, it can be as little as 5 if a late Spring occurs.
Best and worse case scenario , how many months can your bees fly each season? Should be an interesting poll.
Bee
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Here the bees seem to fly any time the temps are over 40F just for a potty break. This past year 03 I watched the girls buzzing about on March 22nd then settle back for about 7 days when the temps went into the low 40F with damp air. They were flying yet during a day in Nov 03 when the temp hit 86F, and again one day in January04 when it hit 49F.
:D Al
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I have noticed similar to what Anonymous said, about 43 degrees and above they will fly in my area which is about 9 months out of the year. Several days in-between the other three months, (when the temperatures reach above the temperatures described), they will also fly.
Therefore I will mark the box provided:
We have mild weather nearly all year round and our bees fly 8 to 10 months a year. ◼️
Phillip
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Where I live bees fly year around.. Unless it's raining hard.. I personally have not seen.. The 🌡 below 70ﾟF. In 5 years ..
BEE HAPPY Jim134 😊
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Worst case: (la nina effects)
- mid June snow melt thru mid august hard frost and September snowfall. 2 months of flying/foraging
Best case: (el Nino effects)
- end of April snow melt thru end of September hard frost and October snowfall. 4.5 months of flying/foraging
The other 7-10 months are variations of a cold white desolate landscape. Not very bee-unfriendly. The upside is being in further north hemisphere is that when it is summer, there are days of 18-20 hours of daylight, not counting twigs light. And the bee tirelessly use every moment of it. Busy as a bee.
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Wow, that's hard.
Unanswerable question I suspect, ,but honey yield per hive on a good el nino year?
There are some photographs in Eva Cranes History of beekeeping showing some enormous multi queen hives in Canada.
(https://acornpreserves.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Skyscraper.jpg)
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Worst case: (la nina effects)
- mid June snow melt thru mid august hard frost and September snowfall. 2 months of flying/foraging
Best case: (el Nino effects)
- end of April snow melt thru end of September hard frost and October snowfall. 4.5 months of flying/foraging
The other 7-10 months are variations of a cold white desolate landscape. Not very bee-unfriendly. The upside is being in further north hemisphere is that when it is summer, there are days of 18-20 hours of daylight, not counting twigs light. And the bee tirelessly use every moment of it. Busy as a bee.
I never thought about that before. I bet that fact is what really makes it possible for bees to live that far north.
Wow, that's hard.
Unanswerable question I suspect, ,but honey yield per hive on a good el nino year?
There are some photographs in Eva Cranes History of beekeeping showing some enormous multi queen hives in Canada.
(https://acornpreserves.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Skyscraper.jpg)
Do you guys ever have bee nightmares, where you are beekeeping and something is just horribly wrong? Well when that happens to me, the hives are usually that big, and I'm standing there with the hive partially taken apart, and realizing that I'm in over my head, but it's too late to go back now. :shocked:
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Wow, that's hard.
Unanswerable question I suspect, ,but honey yield per hive on a good el nino year?
There are some photographs in Eva Cranes History of beekeeping showing some enormous multi queen hives in Canada.
(https://acornpreserves.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Skyscraper.jpg)
We , here in Australia, tend to take honey of regularly. I have never seen anything like it here.
I assume, with all the Council regulations, I would have to engage a structural Engineer to certify that the footings are strong enough.
A Qualified certfier would then have to inspect the site.
A Council expert would then do a double check. :tongue:
Depending on our location we can get honey any time of the year. The Coastal area is generaly blessed with a honey flow in winter. I miss out on this and in any case, we leave winter honey until Spring.
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Wow, I count 16 deep boxes on the back left hive. Hard to get them up there. Even harder to get them off when they are full. My father in law used to have a hive that was always 8 boxes by the end of summer and it was tall and the bees were always mean.
Jim Altmiller
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Wow, that's hard.
Unanswerable question I suspect, ,but honey yield per hive on a good el nino year?
There are some photographs in Eva Cranes History of beekeeping showing some enormous multi queen hives in Canada.
(https://acornpreserves.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Skyscraper.jpg)
Totally answerable. I have the data. 2022 is/was an off-kilter la nina year. Mid winter was brutal cold, spring stayed cold and snow melt was very late. BUT by grace the summer was fairly pleasant and conditions stayed steady, Fall also was tempered and dragged out to match. On most hives I stopped counting at the 5th harvest round and that was at about 360 pounds PER hive. I have a mentee who recently reported to me his crop of 940 pounds off of his two hives. That sounds high, even to me, but not unachievable at his location. Generally I average in range of 240-320 pounds per hive year to year to year.
btw ... hives may only get that tall (in picture) if they are completely unmanaged. That method is hands-off beekeeping of a long by-gone golden age of keeping bees 5 decades ago. Stack them up in the spring and walk away. Come back at end of the season and harvest all at once. We would never get away with that nowadays. One would come back empty boxes full of wasps, ants, and beetles. For the bees to survive today we have to tightly manage the colonies. I go around and harvest 3 to 4 deep supers every 5 days, and they are full on that cycle. My hives mid-summer are 5 to 7 deeps tall depending on how each hive is behaving. Run as single brood box on bottom with queen excluder. Boxes 2 thru 7 are all honey.
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Wow, 300+lbs in such a short season is amazing. UK we have about a 5 month honey season, May-Sept, But yields like that a few and far between. I managed a little over 200lbs per colony harvesting whenever they filled the supers. It also included a lot of migratory beekeeping to various crops like OSR, field beans. borage and heather.
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I remember a winter back in the early 2000s when the bees didn't get a cleansing flight from October to May. But usually there is not a month that goes by that there isn't a day warm enough for one. but there is nothing for them from the first hard freeze to the first blooms in April except on a warm day in March when the Red Maples are blooming.
If I stack up more than six boxes they are likely to blow over. If I stack up more then eight boxes they are guaranteed to blow over. And those are medium boxes...
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It is my hunch that shorter flying seasons yield more honey for the beekeeper. The flows are stronger and the bees don't burn up honey just flying around.
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It is my hunch that shorter flying seasons yield more honey for the beekeeper. The flows are stronger and the bees don't burn up honey just flying around.
Shorter flying seasons usually mean longer days which means more flying time which the bees take advantage of.
Jim Altmiller