🐝 The Beekeeping Year

A European beekeeping calendar is organised by temperature. The colony's year is bounded by winter, and everything the beekeeper does is arranged around getting the bees through the cold. In most of sub-Saharan Africa cold is not the limiting factor. Water is. Your colony's year is bounded by dearth, the period when nothing is flowering and there is no nectar coming in.

So throw away spring, summer, autumn and winter. Replace them with four phases: rains, flowering, flow, dearth. This is not a nice metaphor. It is the structure the actual African research uses. The Ethiopian floral-calendar work organises the year by honey-flow seasons, not by months.

Here are the four phases and what each one asks of you.

1. Rains and vegetative growth. Rain washes nectar out of flowers and keeps bees confined in the hive. Pollen may be plentiful but nectar is often scarce, and colonies eat into their stores. Your job: make sure there are stores. Do not harvest. Repair hives and set out bait hives ready for the swarm season to come.

2. Flowering and build-up. Nectar and pollen start coming in. The queen lays hard and the colony population climbs, but it climbs on a three-week delay, because an egg laid today does not emerge as an adult worker for 21 days. Your job: make your splits now. Add space. Requeen if you are going to. Feed if the colony needs it.

3. Main flow. The colony stores surplus honey above and outside the brood nest. Your job: do not split, because Kenyan practice is explicit that making divisions during the honey season reduces the honey you get. Do not disturb the hive. Add space ahead of need, not after it. Watch for swarming.

4. Dearth. Nectar stops. The colony contracts. It may cannibalise its own larvae. It may abscond, meaning the whole colony walks out and leaves brood, stores and everything behind. Robbing and pest pressure peak. Your job: harvest at the end of the flow, before the dearth bites. Reduce entrances against robbing. Watch for absconding. Feed only if the colony would otherwise starve.

Now the hard part, and the reason this course cannot simply print you a calendar. There is no African beekeeping calendar. There are thousands of local ones, and they contradict each other inside a single district.

Take the sourced example. In one Ethiopian zone, Gedeo in the south, the major honey season was February to March for 59.4 percent of the beekeepers surveyed in the mid-altitude areas. In the highland district of the same zone, Bule, the major season was October to December. Same zone. Opposite seasons.

Read that again, because it settles the argument. Any course, any poster, any extension leaflet that tells you to harvest in month X is teaching a falsehood somewhere. Your calendar belongs to your own 3 km circle and nowhere else.

The same is true of swarming, which is when you catch free colonies. Swarming was observed in July in Kirinyaga and in November in Kakamega, both in Kenya. There is no national swarming season. There is only the one you record.

And it is true of harvest frequency. In that Ethiopian survey 53 percent of beekeepers harvested once a year, 44.4 percent twice and 2.2 percent three times. In Kenya, Transmara beekeepers took three harvests a year at about 10 kg a hive, while Kirinyaga took 7.5 kg per harvest twice, for 15 kg a year. Neither is right or wrong. Each matches its own flowering pattern.

So what do you actually do? You watch two things and write both down. First the plants: what is flowering, and in what month. Second the bees: how heavy is the traffic at the entrance, is pollen coming in on their legs, does the hive feel heavy when you lift a corner of it. Those two records, kept for two years, become your calendar. Everything else in this module hangs off it.

One last point about naming. Do not name your phases by month. Name them by event. Say the flow starts when the croton comes into flower, not that it starts in March. Rains shift. Plants respond to the rains. Your bees follow the plants, and if you tie your plan to a month you will be six weeks late in a year when the rains are late.

This is the most useful planning idea in the whole course, and it is one sentence long. Whatever you want the colony to do at the flow, you must cause six to eight weeks earlier.

Here is the sourced version, from Kenyan extension practice on feeding: start 6 to 8 weeks before the date of flowering, because it takes 6 weeks from egg to adult foraging bee.

And here is why that is true, in biology. An egg becomes an adult worker in 21 days. But a newly emerged worker does not go straight out to forage. She works inside the hive first, cleaning, nursing brood, building comb, receiving nectar and guarding, and only then does she become a forager. Foraging is the last and most dangerous job a bee has. The exact number of days she spends on each in-hive job was not available for this course and you should not quote day bands for it from anywhere. But the total, from egg to bee that brings honey home, is about six weeks, and that is the figure Kenyan practice plans on.

So do the arithmetic on your own site. Suppose your croton and grevillea start in March and that is your main flow.

1. Flow starts in the first week of March.
2. Count back eight weeks. That is the first week of January.
3. That is your build-up date. From the first week of January, your job is to get that queen laying as hard as she can.
4. Count back a bit further for your splits, because a split needs time to recover.

What does managing the build-up actually consist of? Four things.

First, a laying queen. Eggs are your proof. An egg hatches in three days, so seeing eggs tells you a queen was laying within the last three days, and you never need to find her. If there are no eggs and no young larvae in the build-up window, you have a problem that will cost you the flow, because a colony that must raise its own queen needs 16 days to get her emerged, then mating flights, then the start of laying. That is weeks with no new brood, and it is weeks you do not have.

Second, space. A queen cannot lay into cells that are full of honey, and a colony with no room to expand will swarm instead of building. In a top-bar hive that means moving the follower board out and giving empty bars. Give the space before the colony is jammed, not after. But do not overdo it either, because unattended comb is where small hive beetle and wax moth breed. The rule from Kenyan practice is the balance: do not give a colony more comb than the bees can cover.

Third, splits, if you want more colonies. The principle is simple. A colony that has eggs or very young larvae and no queen will raise itself a new queen. So you take a strong colony, divide the brood, the stores and the bees clinging to them between two hives, and make sure the queenless half has eggs or young larvae. Then wait. Sixteen days to a virgin queen, then mating, then laying. Budget several weeks with no new brood in that half.

The timing rule is the important part: split before the build-up, not during the flow. Kenyan practice states it directly, avoid making divisions during the honey season because it will reduce the honey produced. A split made in the flow gives you two weak colonies and no crop.

Be honest about what is not known. The minimum number of bars of brood for a viable African split, the minimum weight of bees, and the success rate of splits with African bees were all unavailable for this course. Nobody can give you those numbers. Record your own: how many bars you gave, and whether the split took.

Fourth, feeding, but only if it is needed and only under the rules in Lesson 5. Feeding is a tool for build-up, not a habit.

One warning specific to African bees. Build-up is the season when you are most tempted to open hives often, and it is also the season when a colony that is disturbed too much simply leaves. Every inspection has a cost. Go in with a question, answer it, and close up.

And one opportunity. Build-up is also swarming season, which means free colonies. Your bait hives should already be out, clean, dry, rubbed with old comb, shaded, and left alone. A bait hive you check every week is a bait hive that will stay empty.

The flow is the few weeks in your year when the colony brings in more nectar than it eats. Everything else in the beekeeping year is preparation for it or recovery from it. Manage it badly and a year of work earns nothing.

First, recognise it. You do not need to open a hive to know a flow has started. The signs are all outside.

• Traffic at the entrance rises sharply, and the bees flying in are heavy and land clumsily.
• The hive gains weight. Lift one back corner. Do this at the same time every week and your hands will learn the difference.
• There is a smell of nectar around the apiary in the evening, and a loud roar of fanning bees at night as they evaporate water out of the nectar.
• New white wax appears at the top of comb. Bees only build comb when nectar is coming in.

Write the date. That date is the anchor of next year's calendar, because it is the date you count six to eight weeks back from.

Now the rules of flow management, and they are mostly rules about restraint.

Do not split. Kenyan practice states it plainly: avoid making divisions during the honey season because it reduces the honey produced.

Do not disturb. Every inspection has a cost with African bees, and the cost during a flow is nectar not collected, plus the real risk that a colony that is being interfered with abandons the nest altogether. If you must go in, go in with a single question and get out.

Do give space, and give it ahead of need. A colony that fills every cell has nowhere to put incoming nectar, and two bad things follow. It backfills the brood nest with honey, so the queen has nowhere to lay and the colony's population starts to fall exactly when you need it high. And it prepares to swarm, which costs you half the bees and most of the crop. In a top-bar hive, add empty bars at the honey end and move the follower board out. In a frame hive, add the super before the existing one is full.

But hold on to the counter-rule from Kenyan practice: do not give more comb than the bees can cover. Space ahead of need is not the same as space without limit. During a flow a strong colony can cover a lot; during the collapse after a flow it cannot, and that is when wax moth and small hive beetle move into the comb you generously added.

Watch for swarm preparation. Queen cells along the bottom edge of a comb point to swarming. Queen cells on the face of a comb point to supersedure, meaning the colony is replacing a failing queen, or to an emergency. Learn the difference and write down which you saw. African bees swarm readily. That is not purely a loss: it is also why bait-hive beekeeping works across Africa and how you stock an apiary without ever buying a colony. Have empty bait hives out during your flow.

Do not feed sugar during a flow. This is a quality rule, not a bee-welfare rule. The international Codex standard for honey allows sucrose of not more than 5 grams per 100 grams in general honeys, and syrup fed during a flow ends up in the crop and shows up in that test. It is one of the tests buyers use to catch adulteration. Feeding with honey combs on the hive can cost you the sale of the whole batch.

Then the decision that closes the flow: when to harvest. The test is the comb, not the calendar. Harvest combs that are three quarters or more sealed, capped full of honey. Bees cap a cell only when they have evaporated the nectar down to a moisture at which it will not ferment. The wax capping is the bees' own moisture certificate, and it is free.

And harvest at the end of the flow, before the dearth bites. Harvesting into a dearth strips the colony of the stores it needs to reach the next flow, and is one of the commonest causes of absconding and outright colony loss in African apiaries.

One timing detail from Kenyan practice worth knowing: harvest between 5.30 p.m. and 7.30 p.m. That is late afternoon into dusk, when the foragers are home and defensiveness is lower. Defensive behaviour in African bees is documented to vary with time of day and with season, so working at the right hour is a genuine safety control and not a superstition.

Finally, watch the weight after harvest. You have just taken the colony's savings. What is left has to carry it through the dearth ahead.

The dearth is the part of the year that decides whether you still have bees next season. It is also the part most beekeeping books skip, because in a temperate country it does not exist in this form.

What happens inside the hive. Nectar stops. The queen slows or stops laying, so no new bees are being made. Meanwhile adult bees keep dying on their ordinary clock, roughly five to seven weeks of life in the active season. The colony's population is the balance of laying rate against death rate, and with laying stopped the population only falls. A colony under stress liquidates its brood first: it will cannibalise larvae rather than starve. If you see brood disappearing during a dearth, check the stores before you start thinking about disease. It is usually hunger.

And if things get bad enough, the colony leaves. Absconding is when the entire colony abandons the nest, brood and all. It is not swarming. Swarming is reproduction, one colony becoming two, and it leaves you the parent colony with its brood and stores. Absconding is escape. Nothing is left. You do not lose half your bees, you lose all of them, and this is the single largest cause of colony loss in African apiaries.

The triggers you can do something about: no forage, pest infestation, ants and honey badger and other predation, rough or excessive interference by you, overheating and no shade, fire and smoke from bush burning, and comb damage during harvest.

So here is the dearth job list.

1. Do not harvest into it. Take the crop at the end of the flow. Never harvest a colony that has little sealed honey, however tempting the price is that week.

2. Know how much to leave, by measurement rather than by rule. No sourced figure exists for the minimum stores an African colony needs to cross a dearth, and this course will not invent one, because a wrong number here starves colonies. What you can do is heft the hive at harvest, heft it again every few weeks through the dearth, and write down what you feel. After one dearth you know your own site's answer, and you know it better than any book.

3. Reduce entrances against robbing. When there is no nectar, strong colonies rob weak ones. A robbed colony usually dies or absconds. A smaller entrance is easier for guards to hold. Avoid spilling honey or leaving wet comb out in the apiary during dearth, because that is what starts robbing frenzies.

4. Take out comb the bees cannot cover. Kenyan practice is explicit: remove old combs that the bees are unable to cover in time of food scarcity. A shrinking colony spread thin across too much comb is exactly what wax moth and small hive beetle need. Take the surplus comb away, render it into wax, and sell the wax.

5. Shade and water. Overheating drives absconding, and a colony may consume up to about 3.8 litres of water a day in hot weather, from a US extension figure. Provide water if there is no source within about 90 metres, make it shallow with stones or floating sticks so bees do not drown, and shade the hives through the hottest hours.

6. Defend against crawling and climbing raiders. Grease the wires the hives hang from to keep ants off, and hang hives securely so a honey badger cannot knock them down. Both are sourced Kenyan practice, and hanging solves ants, badger and grass fire at once.

7. Clear a firebreak before the burning season. Fire and the smoke of bush burning are absconding triggers and hive destroyers, and the dearth is usually the dry season.

8. Feed only if the colony would otherwise starve, and under the rules in the next lesson.

9. Leave them alone otherwise. This is the season when opening a hive buys you nothing and risks everything. Read the outside: entrance traffic, pollen coming in, dead or crawling bees at the front, weight, smell. External observation costs nothing and disturbs nothing, and with defensive bees it is worth more than an inspection.

One piece of accounting to keep you honest. Count your occupied hives at the start of the dearth and count them again at the end. The difference, as a percentage, is your absconding and loss rate. No published absconding rate for African apiaries was available for this course, so yours is the only number you can trust. After two years it is one of the most valuable figures you own, because it tells you whether the changes you made to shade, water, harvest timing and comb management actually worked.

Feeding bees is one of the easiest ways to lose money and to fail a quality test. Start with the question that comes before the technique: does this colony actually need feeding?

There are only two honest reasons to feed.

Reason one is to prevent starvation. A colony with almost no sealed stores, going into or sitting in a dearth, will either starve or abscond. Feeding it is a rescue.

Reason two is to stimulate build-up. You feed a light flow of syrup in the weeks before flowering so the queen lays hard and the colony is populous when the real nectar arrives. That is what the Kenyan guidance is for: start 6 to 8 weeks before the date of flowering, because it takes 6 weeks from egg to adult foraging bee.

There is no third reason. Feeding to make honey is not beekeeping, it is adulteration, and it is dealt with at the end of this lesson.

What to feed. The mixture in sourced Kenyan practice is two parts sugar to one part water. Mix it with clean water, in a clean food-grade container, stir until fully dissolved, and let it cool before you give it.

How to give it. The practical requirements are the same wherever you are.

• Feed inside the hive if you can, not in the open apiary. An open feeder in a dearth starts a robbing frenzy, and the strong colonies take it while the weak colony you were trying to save is robbed out.
• Give bees something to stand on. A shallow container with floats, sticks or gravel. Bees drown in open syrup in large numbers.
• Feed in the evening, so the excitement settles overnight rather than triggering robbing in daylight.
• Feed small and often for stimulation. A trickle tells the colony a flow is starting. A flood just gets stored.
• Keep it clean. Fermented, mouldy syrup does more harm than no syrup.

Now the rules that protect your crop, and they are absolute.

Never feed with honey combs on the hive. Never feed in the run-up to harvest. Sugar syrup fed at those times ends up in the honey you sell.

Why does that matter so much? The international Codex standard for honey defines honey as a natural substance produced by bees from nectar, and requires that nothing be added to it. It sets sucrose at not more than 5 grams per 100 grams for general honeys. Syrup in the crop pushes that figure up, and sucrose testing is one of the standard checks a formal buyer runs. Codex also requires fructose plus glucose of not less than 60 grams per 100 grams, which is the test that catches dilution.

Understand what a sucrose failure actually means to a buyer, because there are three possible causes and the buyer cannot tell them apart: sugar-fed bees whose syrup ended up in the crop, direct adulteration with cane sugar, or honey harvested so early that the bees had not finished inverting it. All three read the same on the certificate. That is why a cooperative can lose an entire consignment because of one member who fed during the flow. Adulteration is a governance problem before it is a chemistry problem.

And remember that Codex is a model, not law, until your own country adopts it. Your national honey standard is the one that applies to you, and you must obtain it from your national standards body.

There is a second kind of feeding worth naming: water. Bees need water all year for cooling the nest and for diluting stored honey, and in hot weather a colony may use up to about 3.8 litres a day. Providing shallow water with landing surfaces is the cheapest feeding you will ever do, it never contaminates your honey, and it keeps your bees away from a neighbour's cattle trough or washing place, which is a classic and avoidable conflict.

Finally, the honest counterweight to this whole lesson. Feeding sugar costs real money and is not free honey later. If you are feeding every year to keep colonies alive, the problem is not the feeder. It is the site, the forage, the harvest timing or the number of hives on that site. Fix those. A landscape that cannot carry your bees through its own dearth is telling you something, and the answer may be fewer hives per site, planting for the dearth, or moving the hives to forage. Feeding is a bridge across a gap, not a way of life.

Almost every beekeeping manual you will find tells you to inspect every seven to ten days. Follow that advice with African bees and you will lose colonies. African colonies abscond in response to disturbance, and excessive or rough interference by the beekeeper is one of the recognised triggers.

Be honest about the evidence. No sourced African inspection-frequency recommendation exists, and this course will not invent one. What can be justified is the principle: inspect when you have a question that the inspection will answer, and not otherwise. In practice that is a handful of times a year. During build-up: is it queenright, does it need space, is it fit to split. Before the flow: does it have space. At the end of the flow: is there capped honey to take. That is most of your year.

When you do open a hive, be fast and be systematic. Kenyan practice on smoking: smoke the entrance of the hive with about 8 to 10 puffs, then wait before opening. Use cool, thick, continuous smoke. Running out of smoke halfway through an inspection is a safety failure, not an inconvenience. Full protection every time: suit, gloves, sealed wrists, sealed ankles. A veil alone is enough for a gentle European colony and is not enough here.

The eight-point checklist, in this order.

1. Is the colony queenright? Best evidence is eggs, which prove a queen was laying within the last three days. You do not need to see her.
2. Is the brood pattern solid? Scattered, spotty brood suggests queen failure or brood disease.
3. Is there disease? Sunken, dark, greasy or perforated cappings are the American foulbrood warning sign. Module 9 covers what to do next.
4. Are there stores? Sealed honey and pollen. A colony with no stores in a dearth will abscond or starve.
5. Is there space? No space during a flow means swarming, or nectar packed into the brood nest.
6. Are there queen cells? Along the bottom edge of the comb points to swarm preparation. On the face of the comb points to supersedure or an emergency.
7. Are there pests? Small hive beetles running from the light, wax moth webbing, ants.
8. Are there laying workers? Several eggs in one cell, eggs stuck on the cell walls, and all-drone brood in worker cells. That is a colony that has been queenless a long time, because open larvae produce a pheromone that suppresses worker ovaries, and without brood that suppression fails.

Answer the questions you came for and close up. You are not sightseeing.

Now the part that costs nothing at all: reading the hive from outside. In a defensive-bee context this is worth more than it is in Europe, and you can do it every week without any risk.

• Entrance traffic. Busy, slow or dead.
• Pollen coming in on hind legs. Pollen going in usually means brood being fed, which usually means a laying queen.
• Guard behaviour. Sudden change in defensiveness can mean queenlessness or robbing.
• Dead bees or crawling bees at the front. Crawling bees with crumpled wings point to virus carried by mites. Piles of dead bees can mean pesticide.
• Weight, by lifting one back corner.
• Smell. A sour or foul smell at the entrance is a reason to look inside.

Record all of it. The colony record card is the most valuable piece of equipment in an African apiary and it costs nothing. One card per hive, kept dry in your store, filled in at the hive and not from memory in the evening.

On the card: hive number, date, time of day and weather, temperament score on your own consistent scale of 1 to 5, eggs seen or not, brood pattern, queen cells and their position, stores, pests seen, action taken and why.

Why it matters more here than anywhere else. You cannot control mating. Your queens mate on the wing with drones from every colony for kilometres around, feral and managed. Buying a gentle queen does not give you a gentle apiary, because her daughters mate with the local drones and temperament reverts within a generation or two. The only breeding tool a small-scale beekeeper actually has is colony-level selection: split from your calmest, most productive, least absconding-prone colonies, and requeen or remove the worst. You cannot do that from memory. Without cards you will split from whichever hive happened to look strong on the day.

And keep last year's cards. One season of records tells you almost nothing. Three seasons tell you which colonies to breed from, when your flow really starts, and which corner of the apiary does best.