What the bees do across the year

Most beekeeping written in English assumes a northern European year: a hungry gap in early spring, a long summer flow, and a winter where the colony sits tight and eats stores. Almost none of that applies here. Our hardest month is August, our best forage starts in January, and the colony is at its most active in April.

We keep nine hives and we are not experts. What follows is what nine years of watching them here has taught us, and it is written down mostly because the standard advice keeps giving people the wrong dates.

January and February

The almond blossom opens in the middle of January and the rosemary on the banks is already going. There is real forage in the coldest part of the year, and the colonies respond to it by building far earlier than they would further north. By the beginning of February there is brood in quantity.

This is also the fortnight that the whole almond crop depends on. If it is cold, wet and still for a week during blossom, the bees do not fly, the flowers are not worked and there is no almond crop that year. That is the main reason there are hives here at all.

March and April

The build continues and this is when swarming happens. We check every seven to ten days through March and April for queen cells and we split rather than lose a swarm. Two of our current nine hives came from splits made in April 2025, after we lost two colonies over the previous winter.

The citrus flowers in April and the smell of it carries across the whole plot for about three weeks. Citrus is not as important to us for pollination as almond is, but it is a significant part of what ends up in the jar.

May and June

The wildflowers on the uncut ground are the biggest single contribution to what the honey tastes like, and they run from about the middle of March to the end of May depending entirely on winter rain. A wet winter gives six or seven weeks of them. In 2025, after 318 millimetres, they lasted about three.

We extract once, in the middle of June, and only frames that are properly capped. Everything else stays on. One extraction a year is unusual and it is deliberate: the colony has to get through July, August and September on what is left, and there is nothing coming in during those months to replace it.

July, August and September

This is the dearth and it is the part that surprises people. By early July everything has flowered and burned off. There is essentially nothing in bloom on this hillside from the beginning of July to the first proper rain in October. Temperatures are over 40 degrees for days at a time. The colony contracts, the queen slows right down, and they live on stores.

What we do in those three months is mostly about heat and water. The hives sit where they get shade from about one in the afternoon. There is a shallow water source within twenty metres with stones in it so they can land, topped up every day, because a bee that has to fly a kilometre for water in 42 degree heat is a bee doing nothing useful.

We also treat for varroa in this window, straight after the June extraction, because there is no honey on the hive to worry about and brood levels are dropping anyway.

October to December

The first proper rain brings a short autumn flush, and there is some forage again for a few weeks. Then it goes quiet. The colonies are not dormant in the way a northern colony is, because it rarely gets cold enough for that, but they are ticking over. We leave them alone, check weight by hefting rather than opening, and wait for January.

Two things we got wrong

The first was treating the summer like a northern summer and expecting a flow. We put supers on in July in our second year and they sat empty for three months while the bees ignored them.

The second was underestimating water. We lost a colony in August 2021 and while we cannot prove it, the nearest water at the time was a long way off and it was 44 degrees that week. We have never had that problem since we put a dish twenty metres from the hives.