Guilfordbeekeepers.org

I was wondering how much honey should we expect in this area around the fall months? I know that Goldenrod and aster are the main sources but is there enough to harvest?

JC

Hi JC!
The fall honey flow varies from year to year but is usually not enough to harvest in this area. I believe that in the North it is a greater crop. The Fall honey also has a tendancy to crystallize more quickly than the Spring crop so we usually just leave it for the bees.
THe good news is that it usually helps relieve some of the feeding that you might otherwise have to do following the summer nectar dearth. The nectar coming in right now through September should help with brood rearing and ultimately winter preparation.

regards,

Kurt

If anyone was wondering, the Aster is definately in bloom. The bees seem to be taking advantage of it and you can smell it if you walk in front of your hives.
No it's not foulbrood and your bees probably havent started a brewery!
After a while you kind of enjoy it.

Kurt

Yesterday I went into hives at the Ag Center, at home, and in Summerfield. I could smell the fall "stink" with butterscotch overtones at home and Summerfield as I approached the hives. The Ag Center hives smelled exactly like that pair of gym socks in the laundry room that kept knocking me back until I ran my last load of wash. The hives in Summerfield potentially have miles of aster along a large power right of way and seem to be gaining weight. The other hives are adding some weight, but not nearly as much.

Fall is definitely in the air.

I hope that the knock back power of the stink in my hives is an indicator that the bees are bringing in lots of aster nectar. My hives stink more than they have in any of the years since I started keeping bees.

I figured i'd find my answer. My strong hive is bringing in some kind of pollen and the hive stinks, same stank my other hive last year. Good to know its a natural stink.

Walking in the yard today, I noticed the asters covered in bees. Yes, they are working them heavily.

I was beginning to wonder about this year's fall flow, but I got smacked in the face by the normal stink when I got out of my car this evening. I hope it continues.

It smells good to me, smells like I might not need as much sugar water this fall. There's at least 10 acres of aster within a mile of me.

From the looks and smell, this is a very good aster year. The strong hives I went into yesterday have added weight and have considerable amounts of honey on them. One even had nice white wax cappings over a few frames of honey. At home, the bees are showing only a modest interest in the honey water I have been putting out. Several hives don't empty a total of 1 quart a day. There were times in late summer where they would have it emptied in around an hour and a half.

When feeding honey water instead of sugar water, what is the ratio and why would you use one rather than the other?

I have been using a minimum of 4 ounces of honey in a half gallon jar. I find that the bees will come to this mix if they are interested in it as feed. I am doing this more to gauge what the bees are doing than as supplemental feed. I put a quart in the feeder in the morning. If it is gone in an hour or an hour and a half, I figure there is pretty much of a nectar dearth. If it takes more than a day to empty a quart and the bees are purposefully flying throughout the day, there is nectar somewhere that they like better. During the winter when the temperature is warm enough for the bees to break cluster, they will often fly out to the feeder and take a bathroom break on the way there or on the way back to a hive. If there is an extended period of heavy interest in the feeder, I start lifting the fronts and backs of the hives to determine if any of them is getting dangerously light and may need frames of honey from my freezer.

The reason I use honey water is so that I know any capped frames in hives other than one I am feeding internally for a specific purpose has honey that can be extracted rather than sugar water "honey". The Lindley Park tree removal Wally helped me with is the only hive I have that is getting sugar water in a feeder. This hive needs to draw wax to fix in and repair comb and needs to replace stores that we cut out of the tree. It is a long shot trying to get this hive through winter and I don't want to use large amounts of my honey reserve on this one hive.

Yesterday when I got home from Art in the Arboretum, I could smell aster in my hives and I could see that some of the volunteer aster plants in my yard are in bloom. I have my doubts about how much of a fall flow there is, but at least there is something.