If you keep good records every year, you’ll know about when to expect the various nectar flows your areas has almost every year and that your bees need to make a honey crop.

Of course, your bees will tell you when a nectar flow starts, and when it’s over. Tell you they will. Open a colony before a flow and the bees are busy looking for food. Open one during a good flow and you will find the happiest bees in the world. Open a colony just as a flow stops and you better have a good beesuit and veil, because they get real testy when the food stops coming in.

Nectar flows overlap, which is great for the bees and your honey crop, but how can you tell when one stops and the next one starts? Not even the bees can tell you that. So, you end up without a defined floral crop, like locust or clover, but with a more generalized “wildflower” blend.

Even after years of taking good notes, some years it’s too dry, too wet, there’s a storm…it’s always something to what should have been an average year.

One thing to remember if nothing else. Always have too much room on top, so the bees always have some place to put that nectar to dry early in the day during a flow, that you missed, again. Too little, and they quit chasing the nectar because there’s no place to put it.

Watch this Honey Bee Obscura video moment for additional great information on Nectar Flows! https://youtu.be/DhcHROgHkN4

 

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This episode of Honey Bee Obscura is supported by the three generations of beekeepers at Leibengood Family Apiaries, providing Georgia certified, southern raised bee packages and queens to central Ohio each Spring!

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Honey Bee Obscura is brought to you by Growing Planet Media, LLC, the home of Beekeeping Today Podcast.

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