Winter work(ers)

Listen.

Can you hear that?

It's very faint, but getting louder.

That's the sound of the beekeeping season approaching 😄.

I'd better stop there, as I've no idea what the sound of the beekeeping season is; buzzing (obviously), piping queens, the 'roar' of a queenless colony, that resigned sigh on finding a sealed queen cell and a depopulated brood box, or the muttered expletives as a bee appears inside your veil?

Whatever the sound, here in the Scottish Borders the first signs of spring are here, so the winter — although far from finished — is definitely in retreat.

And that means that it will soon be time to get dolled up in my profoundly unflattering beesuit, and go 'off to the bees'.

I can't wait 😄.

The first signs of spring

This is my first spring in the Scottish Borders. It's only ~100 miles south from the east coast Fife location where I've had bees since 2015. However, the absence of the cold easterly winds and the haar {{1}} means that the timings of things will be different as the year unfolds.

The winter thrushes have gone already, there are skeins of geese flying North, and the verges are full of snowdrops and crocuses. There are skylarks singing in the field in front of the house, towering over the 'mad March' hares who have misread their calendar.

These signs are all occurring too early in the year — or too late in the winter — to be usefully predictive of the season ahead.

Will it be a cold spring, holding colony development back and (paradoxically) increasing the risk of starvation? Alternatively, will it suddenly turn warm, and stay warm, bringing the threat {{2}} of swarming in April?

Once the well-known summer migrants — the house martins, swallows, willow warblers and cuckoos — start to appear in mid/late March or early April (depending on your latitude) then it will probably already be obvious how the season is developing. Their migration north is influenced by the weather they experience en route and, being insectivorous, they can only progress if it's warm enough for good numbers of insects to be flying {{3}}.

Which also means that your bees will be flying 😄.

What's really needed by beekeepers is a useful predictor (or, for rigour, predictors) that happens sometime between the fieldfares vanishing and the willow warblers appearing. It might be when the buds of a particular tree break, or frogs start spawning, or when the first hibernating red admiral butterflies appear, or — ideally — a dependable combination of these.