🐝 Bee Forage

A colony needs five things from the land around it, and honey depends on all five. Beekeepers who look only for nectar plants get half the answer.

One. Nectar. This is the sugar. It is what becomes honey, and it is what the colony burns to stay alive, to make wax and to keep the brood nest warm. Remember the biology behind this: about 8 kg of honey are consumed to produce 1 kg of beeswax. Nectar pays for everything the colony does.

Two. Pollen. This is the protein. Nurse bees eat pollen to make the jelly they feed to larvae, so no pollen means no brood, and no brood means no bees six weeks later. A landscape can be rich in nectar and poor in pollen, and a colony there will make honey and then dwindle. Watch the hind legs of bees coming into the entrance. Coloured pollen loads going in are your free daily pollen report.

Three. Water. Bees need it year-round to cool the nest and to dilute stored honey. A colony may use up to about 3.8 litres a day in hot weather, from a United States extension figure. If there is no water within about 90 metres of the hive, provide it: shallow, with stones or floating sticks so bees do not drown. Get this wrong and your bees go to a neighbour's cattle trough or washing place, which is a classic and avoidable conflict.

Four. Propolis sources. Bees collect resin from tree buds and wounds and use it to seal and sterilise the nest. African bees propolise heavily. A landscape of bare grassland with no woody plants gives them nothing to work with.

Five. Shelter. Wind protection with good air circulation, shade over the hottest hours, and ground above flood level. Overheating drives absconding and can collapse honey combs, which is why the safe depth limit for a top-bar hive is 300 mm.

Now the idea that matters most in this whole module. What kills African colonies is not the absence of a flow. It is the length of the gap between flows.

Think about what a dearth does. Nectar stops. The queen slows or stops laying. Adult bees keep dying on their ordinary clock of about five to seven weeks in the active season, so the population only falls. The colony liquidates its brood, cannibalising larvae rather than starving. And if it gets bad enough, it absconds, meaning the whole colony walks out and you lose everything in that hive. Absconding is the single largest cause of colony loss in African apiaries, and lack of forage is the first trigger on the list.

So the value of a plant to you is not how much nectar it yields. It is when it yields it. A tree that flowers in the middle of your main flow adds to a surplus you already have. A tree that flowers in the third month of your dearth keeps your colonies alive and at home. The second tree is worth more, even if it yields less.

That single rule, plant for the dearth and not for the flow, decides everything in Lesson 5.

How do you actually judge a landscape? Three questions, asked while walking.

• Is anything in flower right now, and are bees working it? A flower bees ignore is not forage, whatever a book says. Watch for a minute before you write it down.
• Is there something in flower in every month, or are there months with nothing? Gaps are what you are hunting for.
• Are there trees? In the sourced Ethiopian forage inventory from Gedeo zone, 27 honeybee flora species were recorded and 81.5 percent of them were trees, with 11 percent shrubs and 7.5 percent weeds. In that landscape beekeeping is a tree-based enterprise. Cut the trees and the beekeeping ends.

That 81.5 percent figure is the strongest argument available anywhere for beekeeping as a reason to protect forest, and it is a real measured number from a real African study. It also tells you where to look. A landscape of annual crops with no trees will have violent flows and long empty gaps. A landscape with mixed trees, hedges, forest edge and homestead plantings will feed bees for far more of the year.

One warning to close on. Some plants give nectar or pollen that is toxic to people or to bees. No sourced African list of toxic bee plants was available for this course, and this is a genuine food-safety gap. Get a national list from your agriculture or forestry department before you work in an unfamiliar area, and if local people tell you a particular honey makes people ill, take that seriously as evidence rather than dismissing it.

Bees do not stay on your land. That is the reason beekeeping suits a smallholder, and it is also the reason your neighbours' hives are your business.

How far do they fly? Kenyan extension practice plans on bees foraging within a radius of 3 km from the apiary. United States extension gives a similar picture from a different climate: bees prefer to forage within about 2 miles but can travel up to 5 miles if they must, and a second US source says bees travel 2 miles or more for food but at a high energy cost. The sources agree within their own imprecision. Plan on roughly 2 to 3 km of useful forage, and understand that the bees can go further but your honey crop pays for the extra distance in fuel they burn.

Now the arithmetic that makes this real. The area of a circle is pi multiplied by the radius squared.

1. Radius 3 km.
2. 3 squared is 9.
3. Pi multiplied by 9 is about 28.
4. So the circle encloses about 28 square kilometres.
5. One square kilometre is 100 hectares, so 28 square kilometres is about 2,800 hectares.

Your hive stands on about one square metre of ground and farms 2,800 hectares.

Read the second half of that sentence carefully, because it is the whole point of this lesson. Every hive in that circle draws on the same 2,800 hectares. Your hives. The hives of every beekeeper whose apiary is within 3 km. And every wild colony in every hollow tree, rock crevice and roof space in the circle, which in an African landscape can be a great many, because African bees swarm readily and feral colonies are abundant. That is exactly why bait hives work here and why you can stock an apiary without buying a colony. It also means the free colony supply is competition for the same nectar.

So how many hives can one site carry? The sourced rule from Kenyan practice is a maximum of 20 hives per apiary site, and if you want more than 20, find another apiary site 3 or more kilometres away. United States practice states the same idea in different units, keeping a minimum of 3 miles between apiaries to reduce robbing. Both rules are the same thought: separate apiaries by roughly the foraging radius so their circles barely overlap.

Be honest about what that 20-hive figure is. It is Kenyan extension guidance. It is not a measured carrying capacity for your landscape, and no such measurement was available for this course. Real capacity depends entirely on the forage in your own circle. Twenty hives may be far too many in a dry, thin, overgrazed landscape, and comfortably conservative in a coffee zone with mixed trees.

How do you find out which you are in? You measure the only thing you can measure: yield per hive, over years, as hive numbers change.

Here is the logic. If you add hives to a site and the total crop rises but the crop per hive falls, you have passed the site's comfortable capacity. If you add hives and the crop per hive holds steady, the site had room. This is a slow experiment, it takes several seasons, and it needs the records from Module 7. It is also the only honest way to find your own carrying capacity.

There is a second reason to watch density that has nothing to do with nectar. Crowded apiaries mean more robbing during dearth, faster spread of pests and disease between colonies, and a bigger loss if something goes wrong at one site. Spreading colonies over several small apiaries is a risk management decision as much as a forage decision.

A worked example to fix the ideas. You have 20 hives on one site. Your neighbour has 12 hives 1 km away, well inside your circle. You know of perhaps 10 feral colonies in the area, which is a guess, not a count.

1. Colonies drawing on your circle: 20 plus 12 plus about 10, which is about 42.
2. Circle area: about 2,800 hectares.
3. Hectares per colony: 2,800 divided by 42, which is about 67 hectares each.

That number does not tell you whether 67 hectares is enough, because nobody has measured what an African colony needs. What it does is force you to see the competition. If your yields per hive are falling and your neighbour has just added 12 hives, you now know why, and you know the answer is a second site 3 km away rather than more hives on this one.

Finally, keep this in mind when you are offered land for hives. Two apiary sites 500 metres apart are not two sites. They are one site with the hives split into two piles.

This lesson gives you the real floral calendars that African research has actually recorded. Treat them as worked examples of the method, not as a plant list to apply where you live. A plant that carries the honey crop in Kirinyaga may not flower at all in your district.

Start with Ethiopia. In the Gedeo zone of southern Ethiopia, a survey recorded 27 honeybee flora species: 81.5 percent trees, 11 percent shrubs and 7.5 percent weeds. The named species recorded were Hygenia abyssinica, Bidens ghedoensis, Erythrina abyssinica, Eucalyptus species, Cordia africana, Coffea arabica, Vernonia species, Sesbania sesban and Persea americana, which is avocado.

The honey production seasons in that zone were recorded as a major season in February and March, named by 59.4 percent of respondents, with a minor season in May to July and a second minor season in October to December. But in Bule, the highland district of the same zone, October to December was the major season, not a minor one.

Now Kenya, from a practical Kenyan guide, district by district. Read them side by side and notice how little they have in common.

Kirinyaga, a coffee zone:

• Coffee, Coffea arabica: nectar flow in May and June.
• Grevillea robusta: March to April.
• Eucalyptus saligna: June and July.
• Croton megalocarpus: March to April.

Molo, a highland district:

• Dombeya goetzenii: September and October.
• Bottlebrush, Callistemon: June, July and August.
• Eucalyptus saligna: February to April.
• Pawpaw, Carica papaya: August and September.
• Fuchsia: all year except April, May and June.

Transmara, recorded with the Maasai plant names used in the source:

• Oskett, Ogilai and Olmolongina: May to September.
• Oltorioi and Orkikeorgos: June to August.
• Olea africana, the wild olive: June to August, and again November to February.

Nandi Hills:

• Dombeya: April, and September to December.
• Banana and pawpaw: all year round.
• Croton macrostachyus: November to February.

Now put your finger on the single most useful comparison in this module. Eucalyptus saligna flowers in June and July in Kirinyaga. The same species flowers February to April in Molo. Same plant, same country, two districts, months apart.

That is the proof that a national floral calendar cannot exist. Altitude, rainfall pattern and local conditions move flowering by months. Anybody who hands you a printed calendar for your country is giving you somebody else's district.

The yields recorded alongside those calendars are worth knowing, and they tell you what different forage is worth.

• Kirinyaga: 7.5 kg per harvest, 15 kg a year, on coffee, grevillea and croton.
• Kakamega: 30 to 40 kg of crude honey per hive, harvested in February and March.
• Molo: up to 20 kg per hive, described as a lower-potential highland area.
• Transmara: about 10 kg per hive, with three harvests a year.
• Nandi Hills, one hive as a worked example, not an average: 33 kg of crude honey in April plus 15 kg in June.

Handle the Kakamega and Nandi figures with care. They are crude honey, meaning comb, honey, pollen, brood and debris cut out and weighed together. They are not comparable with the Tigray study figures of 17.8 kg for a top-bar hive and 22.8 kg for a frame hive, which are honey. Always ask: crude or strained.

What should you take from all this? Four things.

First, notice which kinds of plant keep appearing. Trees dominate: croton, dombeya, grevillea, eucalyptus, cordia, erythrina, wild olive. Then crops and homestead plants: coffee, banana, pawpaw, avocado. Then a few shrubs and weeds.

Second, notice the year-round entries. Banana and pawpaw all year in Nandi Hills. Fuchsia nearly all year in Molo. Those are the plants that cover a dearth, and they are worth more per flower than anything in the main flow.

Third, notice that several of these are agroforestry species people already plant for other reasons. Grevillea robusta, Croton, Cordia africana, Sesbania sesban and Erythrina abyssinica are all in the sourced lists and all have timber, fodder, shade or soil uses. That is Lesson 5.

Fourth, and most important: none of these lists is yours. They show you the shape of the answer. Lesson 4 shows you how to get your own.

This is the exercise the whole course points at. When it is finished, a sheet of paper on the wall of your store will tell you more about your beekeeping than any book ever will.

Step one. Draw your circle. Take a sheet of paper and draw your apiary in the middle with a circle about 3 km out. Mark the roads, the rivers and streams, the forest or bush patches, the farms and the homesteads. You are not making a beautiful map. You are making a list of directions to walk in.

Step two. Walk it. Pick four directions and walk each one out and back over the coming weeks. Take a notebook and a pencil. For every plant in flower, write: the local name, the botanical name if you can get it, where it grows, roughly how much of it there is, and this month.

Step three. Watch before you write. The rule is simple and it saves you from every plant list ever published: if bees are not working it, it is not forage. Stand for a minute. Are bees on the flowers? Are they taking nectar, or pollen, or both? Are they there in numbers or is it one bee passing through? A tree covered in flowers that bees ignore is worth nothing to you.

Step four. Record for at least two years. One year gives you a single season, and seasons vary with the rains. Two years starts to show you the pattern. Three years is a calendar you can plan a business on.

Step five. Rule the grid. Twelve columns for the months, one row for each plant. Shade the months each plant is in flower. Then read the columns downwards and mark each month.

• Main flow: many plants in flower, heavy bee traffic, hives gaining weight, new white wax being built.
• Minor flow: something coming in, colony holding or growing slowly, no surplus.
• Dearth: little or nothing in flower, no weight gain, robbing starts, bees at water.

The Ethiopian research does exactly this and marks a major season and two minor ones. That is a normal shape.

Step six, and this is where the calendar becomes management. Work backwards from the flow.

1. Write down the date your main flow starts.
2. Count back 6 to 8 weeks. That is your build-up and feeding date, because Kenyan practice says start 6 to 8 weeks before the date of flowering since it takes 6 weeks from egg to adult foraging bee.
3. Fix your split date before the build-up, because divisions made during the honey season reduce the honey produced.
4. Fix your harvest date at the end of the flow, before the dearth bites.
5. Mark your bait hive date before your swarm season. Swarming was observed in July in Kirinyaga and November in Kakamega, both in Kenya, so this date is entirely local and only your record will find it.

Step seven. Confirm the calendar against the hive itself, not just against the plants. The hive is the instrument that tells you whether your reading of the landscape was right.

• Weight. Lift one back corner of the same hive on the same day every week and record light, medium or heavy. Your hands learn fast.
• Pollen at the entrance. Colours and quantity.
• Comb building. Bees build fresh white comb only when nectar is coming in.
• Bearding, fanning and the roar at night, which is nectar being evaporated.

If your plant list says a flow should have started and the hives are not gaining weight, your list is wrong or the rains were late. Correct the sheet.

Step eight. Correct it every year, in a different colour of ink. Rains shift. Trees get cut. A neighbour plants forty avocados. A road takes out a hedgerow. The calendar is a living record, and the corrections are where the learning is.

One honest warning about botanical names. You do not need them to keep bees. You do need them if you want to ask a forestry officer for seedlings, compare notes with a beekeeper in another district, or look up whether a species is restricted. Where you can get a botanical name, write it beside the local name. Where you cannot, press a flowering twig flat between the pages of a book and keep it with your notes.

When you have this sheet, everything in Module 7 stops being general advice and becomes dates in your own year.

Once you know your dearth months, you can do something about them. Planting for bees is the slowest intervention in this course and one of the most durable, because a tree planted this year is still feeding your colonies in twenty years.

Start with the rule that governs every choice. Plant for the dearth, not for the flow. A species that flowers when nothing else does is worth far more than another tree flowering in the middle of your main flow. Go to your twelve-month grid from Lesson 4, find the emptiest columns, and choose species that fill them.

Be honest about the limits of the evidence here. No sourced African bee-forage planting recommendation with nectar yield per hectare was available for this course. The European and Australian tables of kilograms of honey per hectare exist for their own species in their own climates and must not be transferred to African conditions. Anyone who quotes you a honey-per-hectare figure for an African tree should be asked where it was measured. Get a bee-forage list from your own national forestry or agriculture department.

What can be taught safely is the strategy.

One. Trees dominate the resource. In the sourced Gedeo inventory, 81.5 percent of the recorded bee plants were trees. If you plant one thing, plant trees.

Two. Choose trees that pay twice. Several species in the sourced lists are ordinary agroforestry species that people already grow for other reasons: Grevillea robusta, Croton, Cordia africana, Sesbania sesban and Erythrina abyssinica all appear in the Kenyan and Ethiopian bee forage records, and all have timber, fodder, shade, fuel or soil uses. A tree that gives you poles, fodder and nectar is far easier to justify to your family and to a neighbour than a tree that only feeds bees.

Three. Homestead and crop plants count. Coffee, avocado, banana and pawpaw all appear in the sourced calendars. Banana and pawpaw were recorded flowering all year round in Nandi Hills. You may already be growing dearth forage without knowing it.

Four. Protecting is cheaper and faster than planting. A mature Croton or Cordia africana that is already flowering is worth more than a hundred seedlings, and it can be lost in an afternoon with an axe. The strongest argument you have for keeping trees standing is the sourced 81.5 percent figure: in that landscape, cutting the trees ends the beekeeping. Say it to your neighbours in those terms, because it is about their income as well as yours.

Five. Beekeeping is an argument for forest conservation, and it is a sourced one. If you are dealing with a community forest committee, a conservancy or a local authority, the case that honey income depends on standing trees is evidence-backed and it belongs in your negotiation.

Six. Offer the deal to farmers. Honeybee pollination was valued at 14.6 billion US dollars in the United States in 2000, and in Panama coffee bean production increased by 50 percent with honeybee pollination. Coffee matters directly in East Africa, and it is in both sourced calendars: a coffee nectar flow in May and June in Kirinyaga, and Coffea arabica in the Gedeo forage list. Paid pollination services barely exist in Africa and no fee data was available, but the argument to a coffee or fruit farmer, let me put hives on your land and your yield rises, is the cheapest way there is to get apiary sites and more forage.

Now the warning. Eucalyptus is a heavy nectar source in both the Kenyan and the Ethiopian sourced lists, and it is tempting for exactly that reason. But eucalyptus planting is restricted or discouraged near watercourses in several African countries on water-use grounds. Before you plant eucalyptus, ask your national or county forestry and water authority what the rules are where you live. This course states no distance, no permitted area and no rule as if it were yours, because those are set nationally and differ completely between countries.

The same caution applies more generally. Rules on planting, on clearing, on species that may or may not be introduced, and on protected trees, are set by national and local authorities. Ask before you plant, especially if you are planting on land you do not own.

Practical advice for the planting itself. Plant at the start of the rains so seedlings establish without watering. Protect young trees from livestock, which is where most planted seedlings actually die. Plant in groups rather than singly, because a scattered handful of trees gives a scattered handful of nectar. And plant a mixture, not a monoculture, so that a bad year for one species does not empty a whole month of your calendar.

Finally, be realistic about time. A tree planted now will not change your honey crop this year or next. What it will change is the dearth in five and ten years, and whether your children still have bees on this land.

If the forage will not come to your bees, you can take your bees to the forage. That is migratory beekeeping, and in the sourced management literature moving hives to forage is listed as one of the two answers to a dearth, the other being feeding.

It is also the practice with the least sourced African data in this whole course. Migration by wild African colonies, a seasonal directional mass movement tracking rainfall and flowering, is reported and is a real phenomenon distinct from both swarming and stress absconding. But quantitative data on distance, timing and what proportion of colonies migrate was not available. Nor was any African data on the economics of migratory beekeeping, on losses during transport, or on yield gains. So this lesson gives you the reasoning and the rules, not numbers, and you should be suspicious of anyone who offers you numbers.

When is moving worth considering? Three honest cases.

One. Your circle has a long dearth and there is a known flow within reach. Perhaps a coffee flowering, a eucalyptus stand, a river-line forest, a highland zone flowering when your lowland zone is dry. Remember from Lesson 3 that Eucalyptus saligna flowers June and July in Kirinyaga and February to April in Molo. That gap between districts is exactly what migratory beekeeping exploits.

Two. You are being offered pollination access. A coffee or fruit farmer wants bees on the land during flowering. That is forage plus goodwill plus a site, and pollination is a real and sourced benefit to the farmer.

Three. Your own site is temporarily unusable: fire risk, spraying, flooding or building work.

When is it not worth it? Far more often than promoters suggest. Consider the costs honestly. Transport of heavy hives. Labour, usually at night. The risk of comb collapse in transit, which is real in heat and is why the safe depth limit for a top-bar hive is 300 mm in the first place. The risk of absconding after the move, because transported bees abscond and local bees are adapted to local forage and disease. The cost of a second site you must secure, guard and reach in the rains. And the fact that a colony arriving at a flow with the wrong population is a colony that spends the flow building rather than storing.

That last point deserves its own paragraph, because it is where most migratory plans fail. A colony needs about six weeks from egg to foraging bee. If you move colonies to a flow and they are not already populous, you have moved them for nothing. Migration does not replace the build-up. It has to be planned six to eight weeks ahead, exactly like everything else in Module 7.

Now the rules that are not optional.

Biosecurity first. Moving bees is how Varroa, small hive beetle and Tropilaelaps spread around the world. Every colony you move is a colony that may carry pests and disease into a new area, and may bring something home. American foulbrood spores survive dormant in colonies or used equipment for 70 or more years, so a contaminated hive is a permanent problem. Never move a colony you have not inspected. Never take equipment or comb from a colony of unknown status.

Legal next, and this is the part people skip. Movement of bees is set by regulation in most countries and is often licensed or prohibited. Cross-border movement of bees and queens is a particular concern. In South Africa, movement between the Cape honey bee zone and the scutellata zone is controlled because of the laying-worker parasitism problem, and this course states no boundary line: a South African beekeeper must get the current rules from the national Department of Agriculture. Everywhere else, ask your national or county agriculture or veterinary authority what permits, inspections or notifications a hive movement requires. Ask before you load a vehicle, not after.

The practical rules for the move itself.

• Move at night or very early, when all foragers are home. A move in daylight leaves your foragers behind.
• Close and secure entrances, and make sure there is ventilation. Bees suffocate and overheat quickly in a sealed hive.
• Secure the combs. Comb full of honey breaks in transit, and broken comb in a closed hive kills the colony and triggers a defensive nightmare when you open it.
• Move far enough. Bees returning to an old site is the classic short-move failure.
• Open at the destination and leave them alone. Then watch for absconding in the following days, and record what happened.
• Have somewhere to go back to, and a plan for getting home if the flow fails.

Finally, the alternative you should always price first. Splitting your operation across two or three permanent sites, 3 or more kilometres apart, gives you much of the benefit of migration with none of the transport risk, and Kenyan practice already tells you to do that once you pass 20 hives on a site. For most small-scale beekeepers a second permanent apiary in a different flowering zone is the better answer, and it is the one to try before you start putting hives on lorries.