Hi, I’m Stewart Spinks and welcome to Episode 67 of my podcast, Beekeeping Short and Sweet. After our first extraction session of the season, it’s time to consider what the month ahead will bring and also a brief update on how we’re doing so far.Check out my Patreon page here www.patreon.com/norfolkhoney

So we’re just out of the honey room and I’ve enjoyed a decent early season crop of Oilseed Rape honey, even with the numerous splits and swarms we still managed to extract plenty of honey. I say extract, those of you that have been watching the latest videos on my Patreon page will have seen just how much we had to cut out of the frames. Oilseed rape is a terrific early season honey but it does granulate very quickly in the comb. I’m not too disappointed though as I want to have a crack at making my own foundation this year, so need to stockpile plenty of fresh wax for the Autumn and Winter months. The honey room looks like a tazmanian devil has been let loose with a bucket of honey, I’m not sure how I manage to get it everywhere but it just seems to have a mind of its own, so that’s another cleaning job to add to the list. We’ve moved around 30 hives from the Oilseed rape site, I managed to pick the one morning that the skies decided to open up and it rained almost continuously for the entire time we were trying to move the bees. On the plus side, the bees were fairly calm and for the most part stayed in their hives, the flip side of the coin meant despite wearing waterproof walking boots the rain went down my trouser legs and puddled inside my boots making my feet squelch with each step, luckily I can report I didn’t suffer any permanent damage such as trench foot. We were moving the bees to a site of late planted field beans, the top field has a very nice grass track for us to drive along and a fairly flat, hard standing area for the pallets to sit on acting as stands for the hives. We weren’t so lucky with the lower site, the field has been left fallow for the year and the farmer had been over it and drilled some grasses or something into the field, I had to call him to make sure it was ok to drive across, which he confirmed, I obviously didn’t want to upset him on my first day, but the result was my truck tyres collected an additional four or five inches of muddy circumference as we drove across the field and my boots gradually got heavier and heavier with each step until it felt like I was about four inches taller. All that said, the very good news is the field beans have literally just started to flower and we’ve had some much-needed rain which I’m sure will help the plants produce lots of nectar and the weather for the next couple of weeks looks set fair so I’m certain the bees will be all over it. I watched the bees on their orientation flights yesterday, it was lovely to sit and just chill out for 20 minutes watching the bees as they fly out and locate themselves to their hives. I’m certain today and into the weekend they’ll be foraging in earnest with overnight temperatures staying in the double-digit area, sunrise is around 4:30 am so they’ll have some very long days coming up, I must make sure those extra supers are ready, another job for the “to do” list.

Talking of the jobs list, this month is an unusual one as historically, we used to describe it as the June Gap, where forage became more difficult to find and sometimes colonies needed feeding. Oh, one point about taking off the Spring crop, make sure you leave something for the bees, I noticed a couple of my colonies were literally all brood in the brood box with no stores at all, if I had taken all of the stored honey in the supers they would probably be starving right now. That is, if I hadn’t taken them to the field beans of course, but if the weather happened to have turned cold and wet preventing t