Beekeeping Basics

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To give this tale a sweet ending, though, let's come back to the scene a week later. By now, your honey crop is 80% sealed and ready to harvest. Of course, you could leave a "one-way bee escape" (a gateway that lets bees out but not in ) under the super, walk off, and reap insect-empty racks in a day or so. But you've just got too much of a hankering for some homegrown honey to wait, so you pull out the sweet-filled frames one by one and simply sweep all the bees off with a soft-bristled brush—the critters don't seem to mind, either!—and take your golden gatherings home.

BEEKEEPING'S VITAL SEASON

Every beekeeping season has its own annual tasks. Summer work includes jobs such as adding supers and perhaps harvesting. Fall is the time to make sure your bees have all their winter stores built up. And, before winter hits, you need to add some hardware cloth to your hives' entrances (to keep out mice) and start assembling gear for next year.

But the most crucial beekeeping season is surely the spring. Many colonies—having made it through the winter on their own supplies and ready to begin foraging anew—are then faced with a few change-of-season weeks when no harvestable flowers have yet bloomed. If the nectar-gatherers don't have enough extra stores to see themselves through this increasingly active period, you'll have to provide some sugar or honey syrup (and perhaps some pollen or pollen substitute). Otherwise, your bees may have survived the winter . . . only to starve in the spring!

The warming weather after along winter brings yet another threat to your colony's productivity: swarming. In the wild, bee colonies reproduce—annually—by division: Many of the workers and the old queen emerge from the hive and fly off to find a new home. If your bees swarm, a new "replacement" queen and some workers will be left behind to carry on. But much of your best winged livestock will have flown the coop, so the hive will probably not produce a good honey crop the following season.

Although you can take some hive-saving steps, you won't prevent all swarms from occurring. You might, however, balance your losses with gains, since spring is also the season to catch stray runaway clusters and thus increase the number of hives in your apiary!

The danger of swarming—as well as the quality and number of bees that do desert the hive in such instances—decreases as spring turns to summer. As an old nursery rhyme notes: "A swarm in May is worth a load of hay. A swarm in June is worth a silver spoon. But a swarm in July isn't worth a fly."

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