Brockwell Park Community Greenhouses Apiary

The National Honey Show was, by all accounts, a great success. Prizes were won, cups were awarded, lectures were given, tea was drunk and cakes were eaten. The trade hall was full of busy suppliers selling everything from soap to microscopes, and a good deal of business was done.

Much of that business must had involved mouseguards because, by the time I got there on the Saturday morning, mouseguards were out of stock everywhere, and disconsolate huddles of procrastinators were exchanging identical tales of tardy woe. It seems I wasn’t the only one not to have got my ducks in a row. That’s comforting in a way, but also unhelpful.

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Like running railways, beekeeping is an activity in which seasonal change comes as something of a shock. There must be something hypnotic about those sinusoidal schoolbook graphs of temperature and rainfall, for there’s no other explanation why, each autumn, I find myself short of mouseguards.

A mouseguard, as the name implies, is a guard against mice. It is usually a thin metal strips with small holes in, large enough to allow bees through, but not big enough to let mice follow them. You can make your own, by hammering lots of small nails into a strip of wood, like the teeth of a comb. But to do that, you need to know how far apart the nails should be. I can never remember and I’ve never found a mouse willing to help.

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The honey harvest is over, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to be done in the apiary. Last Sunday, in front of an unusually large gathering of onlookers, we performed what is possibly the dullest bit of work beekeeping has to offer.

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Volunteers working on the viewing area

For the last couple of weeks, bar the swarminess, we’ve tried to leave the bees to themselves to make the most of all the summer flowers, and busied ourselves with making the apiary area a bit nicer (we’ve now lost the mesh curtain, and perspexified the viewing area). But now the flow of nectar has slowed to a trickle, and although the bees are still busy on lavender and fuchsias, it’s time to call it a season.

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A couple of weeks ago, I went to the LBKA barbecue. Very nice it was too.

There’s not usually much danger in this.  Swarms aren’t common in July, as, by this time of year, all the swarming that’s going to happen has happened. Moreover, now that day lengths are getting shorter, queens should be laying fewer eggs, so congestion in the hive is less likely.

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It’s happening. Lime trees and brambles are in flower, and honeybees are all over them collecting nectar. They’ll be foraging from all sorts of other flowers, too, and London’s alive with bugs and blossom. At this time of year, honeybee colonies are at their fullest and strongest, and I doubt that’s coincidence (it’s all to do with day-length, apparently).

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I’m expecting the main honey flow of the year to start very shortly, if it hasn’t already. In London, the most prolific time for nectar seems to be in July, while the brambles are in flower, and the bees take advantage of this.  The amount of nectar available is very variable – it’s dependent on the right balance of rain and sunshine, and on how well plants have done earlier in the year  – but if it’s there, the bees will get it.

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