a tricky one

The 2019 honey season came to an end. This year was comparably challenging. In our alpine region, the biggest challenge was the rainy weather beginning of June. The colonies that fared well in those two weeks were able to harvest plentiful until first week of August. However, keeping a strong colony back from swarming after being locked-up for two weeks is almost impossible. Luckily we trimmed strong colonies before moving them up into the mountains. However, some colonies still decided to swarm. The colonies that we have built in April on the other hand got two extra weeks breeding worker-bees and they were at full strength by mid June. Exactly those colonies secured our honey harvest. Although we couldn’t match results of last year’s record season the quality of the honey is excellent. Due to the long lasting favorable conditions until the second week of August we could give the bees some more time to ferment the honey. Also the varroa did not catch up to threat levels up to now.
Now is the time to prepare the bee colonies for winter. We will slightly adjust our preparations for winter therein that we will have a closer look at insulation and optimal thermal conditions in the hives.