In the July newsletter, Geoff Cooper noted that the hot and dry weather was causing the main summer nectar plants to flower soon after the spring flow, thus eliminating the ‘June gap’. On 9th July, I saw worker bees evicting drones from a hive in Brookwood. This is normally something that happens in August and is further evidence of the unusual weather pattern in 2025 speeding up the typical milestones in the beekeeping year.
Andrew Halstead
Thank you, Andrew, for this very interesting observation. I did see some drones in the one hive I went through today (1st August), so they have not all been evicted yet.
Another warning of robbing at the end of the honey flow
In response to your editorial about the end of the flow and bees robbing:
We have been taking fully capped or nearly fully capped frames from supers as necessary, and replacing them with empty drawn comb or wet comb after spinning, to make sure the bees have enough space to store all the honey that they were producing through May and June. The plan was that we will take the main honey crop in the first couple of weeks of August.
Yesterday (5th July) while putting wet comb back into the colonies, the large plastic bags that we carry the supers around in was surrounded by bees, which has not been a problem up until now. We also noticed that 2 of the smaller colonies appeared to be attracting the attention of robber bees. This is new behaviour for this year, so I would agree with you that it appears that the flow has stopped, the bees have changed their behaviour, and it’s going to be a long summer between now and getting ready for winter and winter feeding. So, I fear that there is likely to be a much smaller summer honey crop than we had hoped for.
David Ramsay
Thank you, David, for this report of the bees’ activity. They are good at telling us to be aware of the signs of robbing, and this was the way they did it for you.