No More Beekeeping Calendars Please!!!!
In more reliable times we could predict the seasons, but all that has changed. We should no longer do our beekeeping by the calendar.
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Thirty years ago when I first started beekeeping nearly every book you could buy told you what to do in each month, and if you followed the rules you were fine. Today, all bets are off as the weather and climate are increasingly unpredictable. If you want to be a good beekeeper today, you can’t do things by the calendar.
Good beekeepers now need to be highly flexible. Take swarms for example. In the old days there was a rhyme:
A swarm in May is worth a load of hay. A swarm in June is worth a silver spoon. A swarm in July isn’t worth a fly.
No rhyme for March or April at the beginning of the season or August or September at the end. The simple reason for this is that swarms almost never happened outside of those three core months. Now, we get swarms starting much earlier and finishing much later.
The same applies to other bee issues such as starvation. In times gone by, if you got your bees through the Winter you could breath a sigh of relief. Now as many, if not more, colonies starve in the Spring as over Winter. Your feeding regime must be determined by the bees and the weather, not by the calendar.
Inspections are more important than they have ever been. Things like forage, disease, colony build up / wind down and swarming used to have a large degree of predicability. This is no longer the case. Beekeeping has arguably become more difficult, or put another way, more interesting. If you want to be a good beekeeper, throw away your calendar, put on your suit, check those bees and act according to their needs.
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