This week we started to pull our big orange crop…. Not. The bees have done a very good job of pulling the double waxed Acorn foundation but sadly there was not enough sugar content in the nectar in the orange groves here in South Lake County to accumulate much more than a 30lb average of honey. It is certainly a far cry from the 120lb average days of 20 years ago.
The mating nucs have continued to give us an 80% average on queen takes and we are generally able to make up 20 extra nuc boxes or better out of each group of nucs we cage from the extra brood we pull. We’re still just keeping up with orders but we can see a light at the end of the tunnel. Next week we should begin to get ahead of the curve and start taking care of waiting list customers. So even though the honey crop in the orange was as predicted short, we’re not disappointed with the season as the mating nucs and five-frame nuc production remains strong and the bees look as healthy as ever.
We’re hoping that in the next couple of weeks bees that we will move out of the orange groves and into some of the surrounding swamps will do better on the galberry than they did last year.
I was talking with the Latners yesterday at Dadants where I was picking up sucrose… again, and the discussion centered around the lack of honey production beekeepers have been experiencing for the last decade or better. We can’t be sure, but anecdotally it appears to us, who spend more hours of the day in beehives than most people spend sleeping, that the field force of the hives simply aren’t living as long as they used to. Perhaps as little as three weeks as opposed to the five or six one would expect. Again, we can’t be sure and we can’t account for this lack of adult forging bees. We only know the colonies are not as robust and full of bodies as they used to be. The queens have no problem filling a brood chamber with sheets of perfect brood, we’re seeing eight, nine, and even ten sheets of brood of varying age in many of our singles. While they’re full of bees, they’re not bearding and they’re not crowding themselves with nectar, something we would expect with so much blooming around them. Could it be that they have just enough field force to keep the colony fed but not enough to bring in the surplus? Or does the problem of the lack of honey lay with the blooms of the various wild flowers and shrubs? Is something robbing them of nectar content or sugar content like the greening is doing to the citrus? The trouble is we’re too busy raising our families, keeping our bees healthy, and raising cells and queens and nucs, to find the answers. I think it’s a “can’t see the forest for the trees” thing