Closing up a cool, gray year
An early autumn?
It may just be the end of August, but it's felt like fall for at least a couple weeks already! The bees are getting ready for winter, so we are too. Here's a look back at the beekeeping season:
The lack of any maple flow in May, or really any breaks in the weather at all before mid-June meant that the bees went into the blackberry bloom hungry. Mid-June brough lots of unseasonal heat, which pushed the blackberries to produce nectar and the hives that were ready to bring it in at that exact moment did ok, but we lost about half of the crop to the bad weather at the start of June. Knotweed hasn't produced meaningful amounts of honey at any of our apiaries in years.
Top that off with cooling temperatures in late July and August, and even the fireweed isn't producing much. All in all, we'll probably have 4-5 weeks total of decent bee forage this entire year!
But, time waits for man nor bee, and winter is coming. The bees are preparing themselves, starting to raise specialized winter bees who will keep the hive going throughout the cozy season. To help them with that, we're working on getting their varroa mite levels down (the main killer of honey bees in the winter), after which we'll be watching carefully to see if knotweed honey starts being stored in meaningful amounts. If not, we'll be back to feeding! We prefer for the bees to collect nectar (which they convert into honey) for their overwinter use, but when that's not available, pure 1:1 sugar syrup is the closest thing to nectar that we can provide them with.
What can you do?
No one can do anything about the weather, but honey bees in particular, and really all pollinators in the Puget Sound region, are highly dependent on just a few relatively short periods when there is ample nectar available in nature. It doesn't have to be that way, but we weeded out all of the pollinator friendly native plants that would otherwise be providing pollinator forage throughout the year.
With the best of intentions (and we support the efforts), homeowners and local governments have started a campaign against both nonnative blackberries and knotweed (both of which are great pollinator plants; just look at either when they're blooming and you'll see lots of different types of pollinators on them). As we said, we support getting rid of these invasive noxious weeds, but unfortunately we're mostly not replacing them with other pollinator friendly plants. In many cases, we're not even actually killing the weeds, we're just keeping them from flowering. We're just expanding the pollinator desert!
If you have blackberry or knotweed patches, it's ok to remove them! Doing so will be better for our ecosystem in the long run. We just ask you to replant with pollinator friendly plants (natives are great, and often require less work!). Some ideas for wild or less managed areas of your property are thimbleberry, snowberry, cascara buckthorn and fireweed.