I got a warning letter from the Ministry of Bees last month. Government inspectors had found that many hives of bees were close to starving, so the Ministry wrote to all beekeepers urging them to check that their bees had enough food.
I wasn't surprised - August is a terrible month for bees because there are so few flowers. Sure, bees living near the waterways may have purple loosestrife and Himalayan balsam to visit, but for most there are only slim pickings in suburban gardens.
Not that it should be a problem - strong colonies make 50 - 100 lb of honey during the summer which is more than enough to see them through to next year, so all would be fine, except for one thing. The beekeeper!
Greedy or incompetent bee-keepers strip the hives of all their summer honey. If the bees are 'lucky' they get fed sugar syrup and if they aren't .... they starve. The rapacious logic is simple; honey sells for £5/lb whereas sugar costs 25p/lb.
I wasn't concerned about the letter. I'd taken a good honey crop but still left my bees with plenty to see them through to the end of September - but not longer!
I'm relying on the ivy which is just coming into flower. Ivy produces lots of very sweet nectar which is almost 50% sugar. It's so concentrated that on warm sunny days you can see crystals of sugar glistening on the flowers. The bees, wasps and red admiral butterflies all love it!
But many beekeepers don't. The high glucose content of ivy honey causes it to crystalise in the honeycomb. Beekeepers worry that their bees may not be able to access enough water in the winter months to dissolve the honey, resulting in starvation.
Come the spring any ivy honey left in the comb blocks up the brood nest and has to be removed, but the only way to remove the honey is to heat the comb, which destroys it. Worse still, ivy honey doesn't taste very nice.
So to stop their bees making ivy honey many beekeepers keep feeding their bees sugar solution - gallons of it.
Their bees seem to do well, but it doesn't feel right to me. Instead I let my bees make all the ivy honey they can. Even on the coldest days of winter condensation in the hive will provide sufficient moisture, and come the spring any frames of uneaten honey will be set aside to feed any colonies that need a honey top-up.
There is a risk - if the weather is really bad over the next month the bees may not collect enough ivy nectar, and it may then be too cold for an emergency sugar solution feed.
But you have to have faith in these things - such is the ministry of bees!
