Heather weather

[greengumbo]

Update:

Moved all my hives up mid July. Checked last week and its a mixed bag but not looking like a great year. Ling still going but lots of brown flowers already. I will leave it a bit longer but not optimistic. How are others doing ?

[Thymallus]

North Yorks Moors western side is producing lots of nectar. Most hives have filled 3 or four supers (not fully capped) and may need more. Although the recent rain and cooler weather may slow them down a bit.
Intriguingly it's a bit checkerboard in places. Full out in some areas and just coming out in others. It may (or may not) be an extended season. Possibly due to whether the heather was over underlying deep wet "peat" or smaller distance to sub rock.
But it's not exceptional, just the norm for this area.

[Calluna4u]

North Yorks Moors western side is producing lots of nectar. Most hives have filled 3 or four supers (not fully capped) and may need more. Although the recent rain and cooler weather may slow them down a bit.
Intriguingly it's a bit checkerboard in places. Full out in some areas and just coming out in others. It may (or may not) be an extended season. Possibly due to whether the heather was over underlying deep wet "peat" or smaller distance to sub rock.
But it's not exceptional, just the norm for this area.

You are very very lucky, but then Yoprkshire has been 5C or more warmer than our areas over the last fortnight. Have some Yorks. friends reporting a very poor heather harvest, but then they left the bees gathering blossom and missed the first fortnight of the heather.

Bees on the moors in July have done well...some places VERY well. One or two sites will average 50Kg. 25Kg more normally. Bell yielded in only about half of the normal areas, but the ling started by mid July and helped a lot.

Bees put up in August have done very little indeed, the weather is shot, and the moors now mostly brown. Its pretty well over in most of our areas. About 20% of our apiaries have very little indeed, which will drag the overall average on heather well down from 25Kg. (Long term (35yr ave.) is 21.4...so not going to be a BAD heather year). The bees have known this for a long time and the rate of laying even in nucs tailed off around 3 weeks back and they are getting very dour about further expansion.

Drones are mostly out, wasps are savaging the mating boxes and smaller nucs, balsam doing zilch apart from a few white bees coming in. Paying for the big heat earlier. Hurts the later flowers.

[Thymallus]

. Have some Yorks. friends reporting a very poor heather harvest, but then they left the bees gathering blossom and missed the first fortnight of the heather.

Many round here decided it wasn't worth taking their bees to the heather because of the drought. All were predicting doom and gloom.
Currently all is still looking good on the heather with the bees working well.
But our borage harvest was a disaster. The plants where weedy and limp with brown leaves. Even the rainfall they did get was too little and too late. Last few years we seem to average around 34kg/hive...down to 7kg this year....and not sure how pure it is until I check the pollen content. The honey looks darker than usual.
Will be interesting to see how these borage hives fare now, as we took a few to the heather on the 8th of August with empty supers.