Heather weather

[Calluna4u]

I'd be delighted with 10 Kg per colony harvested heather honey never mind what you are getting C4U. I had a miserable morning yesterday in the Angus glens - taking supers off and getting the bees setup for a trip back home. My crop this year is going to be pretty poor and I think this is to do more with colony strength (and timing for bees of the right age) rather than the heather. I say this on the basis of a couple of colonies doing OK. Also, a predilection for getting sections not helping me. It was a real surprise to see the second flush of flowering you were describing - in places the heather, especially the bell, looks better than it did a couple of weeks ago.

BTW - the Porter's worked almost perfectly this year - helped by a couple of very cold nights.

What date did you go up?

Have our best yields in Glenesk and Glengairn...poorest will be the later bees up the A9 north of Dalwhinnie or any bees placed in Angus after 1st August.

However...the picture is very mixed even in the August bees. I said we were going to Glenfeshie and those bees (6 sites, many are from our own queen unit) have somehow packed in (estimated) 18 to 20Kg average.

Bees placed near Dalwhinnie in the same week have practically zero...well not zero but a pretty paltry crop.

However there is still heather flower in all areas up there from late flowering clumps, so the weather over the next few days might give a bit more....the colonies are of better bee power than normal for the end of August (possibly due to inactivity not burning them out) so they have a chance. It was pretty cold on the western moors Tues/Wed so there was very little bee flight, but my guy working in Deeside west of Ballater reported good flight there, a lot of pollen, but no appreciable nectar.

Overall impression thus is that some areas are outstanding, others average, and a significant minority very poor. Therefore thinking that, all lumped together it will be somewhat above average heather but not bumper. Pretty content with that given all the problems we faced this year.

Will start boarding some of the earliest finishing areas (east Deeside I think) at the end of next week.

and...FWIW....and now rather out of date...we did side by side testing on various levels of crop from different types of supering at the heather back in the 80's. Sections results were only around 20% of the harvest of the best system (for weight of harvest) which was drawn comb deeps. A fairly predictable hierarchy of crop.....Drawn deeps best, then drawn shallows, foundation deeps, foundation shallows, thin super shallows (significant difference from using standard weight foundation), and lagging far behind were starter strips and sections.