Entry 02 · Forage
The forage year on this slope, from willow to ivy
Everything this apiary does in a year is decided by about six plants and the order in which they flower. Learning that sequence, and learning where it breaks, has changed more of my beekeeping than any piece of equipment ever has.
- At the hive
- 16 September 2024
- Typed up
- 9 March 2025
- Reading
- 8 minutes
- Stand
- the Taunus foothills above Frankfurt
February to April: willow, and everything after it
The year opens with hazel catkins, which give pollen and nothing else, and then with willow, which gives both and arrives on this slope in the last week of March. Willow is the hinge of the whole spring. A colony that gets a fortnight of it builds brood fast enough to be a serious foraging force by the time the fruit blossom opens. A colony that meets cold rain through the willow sits still instead, and stays three weeks behind for the rest of the season.
Fruit follows in the orchard the hives stand in, plum first, then cherry and apple, and the ground under the trees goes yellow with dandelion at roughly the same time. Between them they carry the colonies through most of April without any help from me. I have fed syrup in April exactly twice, both times to a colony I had split too early, and on both occasions the feeding was fixing my own decision rather than anything the weather had done.
The rape fortnight, and what it does to a colony
Below the slope, where the hills flatten towards the plain, there are fields that go to oilseed rape in some years and not in others. When they do, and when the wind sits in the south, the difference inside a hive is unmistakable. Boxes gain two or three kilograms in a day, the bees smell faintly of cabbage, and fresh comb appears in every gap they can reach. It runs for a fortnight and then stops as though somebody had closed a tap.
Rape honey granulates in the comb within weeks, which caught me in my first good year and cost me a full super that had set solid before I got round to it. What I do now is simple and slightly anxious: check weight every few days through the flow, take frames off as soon as they are capped, and give the colony room a week before I think it needs any. A rape fortnight with no space above the brood is the most reliable way I know to trigger swarming.
Written on the card
- Weight can climb two or three kilograms on a good day
- Give space a week before the colony looks short of it
- Take capped frames off early; rape sets hard in the comb
- Some years the fields are not sown, so none of this is a plan
The June gap nobody warns you about
Between the end of the rape and the lime coming into flower there is a stretch of two or three weeks when almost nothing on this slope yields. The weather is usually fine, the colonies are at their largest, and very little is coming in. My first year I read the fine weather as a flow and left the hives alone. By the end of the month one colony had eaten its way through nine frames of stores and was carrying dead larvae out of the entrance in the middle of the afternoon.
The gap is worse in a dry June, which we seem to get more often. Clover on the mown grass helps a little, bramble starts unevenly along the hedges, and a colony that came through the rape with a full brood nest has thousands of mouths and nothing much to put in them. I weigh the hives by hand every week through June, lifting one back corner at a time, and I trust that rough measurement far more than how busy the entrance looks on a warm evening.
Lime, bramble and the late ivy
Lime saves the summer here. There are avenues of it in the villages below and a few old trees along the lane, and in the first fortnight of July they give a flow you can smell standing underneath them at nine in the evening. It is unreliable in the way lime always is, and a hot dry spell can shut it down in three days. Bramble runs alongside it through July and into August, far less spectacular and much steadier, and most years it is bramble that fills the boxes.
The last thing to flower is ivy, in October, on the walls and the old trees at the edge of the orchard. It comes in when nothing else does and it fills frames the colony will need in February. I take nothing from an ivy flow. It sets hard and granular, the bees can use it perfectly well, and a colony that ends October two frames heavier than it would otherwise have been is a colony with a better chance of being alive in March.
Written on the card
- Late March: willow, the hinge of the whole spring
- April: plum, cherry, apple, dandelion under the trees
- Mid-May: rape below the slope, in the years it is sown
- July: lime for a fortnight, bramble all month, ivy in October