British Beekeeping in the Summer Months

Emily Abbot, a honey expert and founder of Hive & Keeper, explains why the weather is of pivotal importance to beekeepers during the summer months

Words & Photos: Emily Abbott

Beekeeping – I mean ‘in the moment’ beekeeping when I’ve opened the hive and I’m holding a frame of bees to check that all is well with the Queen’s laying eggs, and the colony busy – is almost meditative. You have to keep calm, to be very present, and think only about what you’re doing and observing. No rushing, no to-do-lists…

It’s a huge contrast to my day-to-day state of mind, which remains alert to both the gifts and dangers that nature can bring my bees’ way. My biggest wish: ‘please may the weather be good to them!’

It’s not the temperature I worry so much about. Bees can manage both scorchingly hot and mind-numbingly cold days as they have the most sophisticated air conditioning system. They fan their wings to evaporate water droplets that they bring into the hive, and then circulate this cooler air.

When it’s cold they dislocate their wings and shrug their large wing muscles up and down to generate heat, so that whatever the weather the hive is maintained at a constant 35 degrees celsius. This, by the way, is the maximum temperature a honey should be heated up to if it’s to maintain the natural characteristics and enzyme activity that the bees gave it.

It’s the rain I worry most about…

Too wet and the bees will stay in the hive, relying on the honey and pollen they have stored across their wax combs to keep them and their young growing and fed. This is fine as long as they have stores, but a long wet spell can be touch and go. It’s really the torrential downpours and winds that bring the petals to the ground that I hate to see, as it feels like wasted food.

Poor bees, just like a baby in a high chair that’s dying to be fed but their food is thrown all over the kitchen floor and ruined!

Please may this summer be dry. But not too dry…

I love balmy summer days and so do the bees, but if the sunshine continues for too long the ground can get too dry, which hampers plants’ ability to produce nectar (as they need moisture).

No nectar means no honey. If the bees can’t make enough honey to keep them fed through winter then their survival is in jeopardy, and the chance of us taking some to enjoy has gone.

I watch the weather just like an arable farmer does who wishes for perfect growing conditions. The weather connects and influences so much of our natural environment, and I’d only been thinking about it from my bees’ perspective. John Donne put it so beautifully when he wrote ‘no man is an island entire of itself’: 400 years on it reminds us of our connections to each other, our world and natural environment.

hiveandkeeper.com