Although it started off with some up and down temperatures, spring was moving along very nicely, with local plants blooming profusely, and the girls bringing in lots of nectar and pollen. Then May hit. From a temperature standpoint, May wasn’t a bad month. But we only got 0.2 inches of rain (the average for May is 3.66 inches). The impact wasn’t immediate, but by the end of the month, fewer plants were blooming, and the blooms weren’t as rich in nectar as they had been. Beekeepers refer to it as a nectar dearth.
As the lack of rain of continued into June and July, we saw the girls adjust to the drought (Mecklenburg County, where we have our home apiary, and neighboring Union County, where the Nuthill Farms girls are located, are both currently classified as being in moderate drought). On the hives with honey supers, where there were frames that needed comb to be built, comb-building activities ceased. Some cells in the supers that were partially filled with nectar were cleaned out. (We’re not sure whether the nectar was consumed, or added to other cells to fill them.)
This table shows the monthly average rainfall in Charlotte for each month through July, and shows the actual rainfall at our Morningside beeyard for the same months. While the rainfall through April was lower than normal, it took a nosedive starting in May.
It was interesting to note the difference between the two beeyards. The Nuthill Farms hives, where we harvested about 90 lbs of honey in late May, we replaced the harvested supers with new ones that had foundation only frames. This was early in the drought, and we were optimistic that the rain would return, and the Nuthill girls would resume aggressive comb-building activites. That didn’t happen. As a result, those hives were left with a lot of frames with partially built out comb. One of the interesting dynamics we ran into when we did our main harvest on July 18, was a number of frames from those hives had 100% capped cells, but those cells only covered a portion of the frame. The rest of the frame would have a combination of bare foundation, partially built comb, or fully built comb that was completely empty. So a number of the frames we harvested from those hives were only partially filled with honey.
These are a couple of partially capped frames from the Nuthill Farms hives. The top frame is mostly capped, with only a small amount of empty cells. The bottom frame has only a little capped honey, and consists mostly of empty cells.
The girls of Morningside were a different story. Of course, they got an unfair advantage . . . Of the six supers we placed on them, half of them were empty supers from the May honey harvest at Nuthill Farms. As a result, the vast majority of frames in their supers had completely built out comb. So all of the frames we harvested from the Morningside apiary were slap full of honey.
As a result, even though we harvested one whole super more of honey from Nuthill Farms, because so many of the frames were “partials”, we only got about ten more pounds of honey from the Nuthill Farms bees than we did from the girls of Morningside.
Whether this drought will continue, and if so, how it will impact the girls going into the winter will be something we will be monitoring closely over the next few months.
Ed
The Girls of Morningside 