This spring many people asked me if I had honey to sell but unfortunately I had to explain the strange situation of this year. But now there is honey!
I do home delivery of honey in Vetto in the days when I bring our daughter to school. I will be present on the chestnuts village party on the 10th of November in Vetto and at the Sunday market in Vetto (when it does not rain).
In short, the answer: climate change
In February and March 2019 there were already days when we could stay outside in a short-sleeved shirt. With the high temperatures the bees began early with their development and used a lot of honey to feed the brood (the larvae that become new bees). There were still no flowers with a decent amount of nectar and the bees used most of their honey supplies. It seemed that winter was over, but …
… it rained during the blossoming of wild cherry trees that bloom early in the spring. When it rains the bees must stay inside, because there is no sun and without the sun the trees do not produce nectar. Even with the maples it went wrong: I noticed that they only had a few flowers, and this still meant no nectar.
Then the beginning of May arrived with the flowering of acacia. This is normally a flowering with abundant nectar that serves to totally reinforce all the bee colonies. But then a total nightmare happens! At the 5th of May: 40 cm of SNOW! After 2 days all the snow was gone again and all the ice water had entered into the ground. Trees and plants did not produce nectar, because their roots were in the cold earth. And so it all stopped! The bees were at the end of their winter stocks with really many new bees ready to collect the the acacia nectar but with the cold, the snow and a lot of rain the month of May they all had to stay inside for the complete month! All the colonies were hungry and completely WITHOUT stocks of honey in their nest. I have never seen such a thing during my years as a beekeeper!
I thus had to save all, all, all my colonies of bees! Without my intervention they would all be dead! I saw videos of other very angry Italian beekeepers who showed all their dead bees in the hives because they failed to intervene in time to feed them. My colonies were numerous and they had to eat: a month of rain and cold without eating would have meant only one thing: Death! I had to buy at least 200 euros of sugar an they ate everything in a hurry! There was no longer any sign of this remarkable sugary load, all eaten by the bees …
Only with the arrival of the chestnut bloom did the bees begin to create stocks for them (in the nest) and for the melario. After that we had a very hot summer and fortunately also some rainy days that allowed us to have more flowers in the fields.
In the end I managed to save my bees and also to make some honey (half of what i collected in 2018).
Since I had to give 200 euros of sugary substances to save the bees and I only collected half of last year’s honey, I was forced to raise prices. I hope I can make a better price next year …
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