Am I the only one in Newfoundland who thinks this has been an unusual and even slightly weird summer for beekeeping? Here are the hive inspections that got me thinking about this.

I have heard more weird stories about queens this year than ever before. Queen-grafting with not exactly stellar success rates. Virgin queens that mate and then are immediately superseded. Queens that emerge from their cells and are balled to death before they can mate. Queenright colonies that suddenly become queenless without superseding. The only success I had in the queen department was with a walkaway split I created in late June. The queen mated well in July and was off to the races by August, fully accepted by her new colony. Everything else has been a gong show, and apparently I’m not the only one.

This kind of queen weirdness is usually the fault of the beekeeper because there’s nothing more finicky in beekeeping than creating or introducing new queens. It often requiring extreme attention to detail that not all of us during the heat and sweaty business our beekeeping are able to sustain. Regardless of our attention spans, the failure rate seems to have increased greatly this summer for many people.

Then we had unusually dry, hot weather in the spring and for most of the summer (so far). The brood production in all of my colonies, even my Flatrock bees that usually seem hampered by the poor climate, was off the charts in the early spring. I had to keep a close eye on all my hives because the swarming risk was high for weeks on end.

This resulted in a massive early honey harvest in one location where I keep my bees. But my bees in the other two locations, even the area outside of Flatrock (shown in the video included in this post), haven’t produced much honey yet. They’re on their way, but it seems the population exploded and then the honey production plateaued. The bees are just sort of sitting there doing nothing.

In the past two weeks, it seems there’s been a slight nectar dearth as well. I had a hard time keeping up with the expanding hives earlier in the summer, adding new boxes every week or so. But now I’ve had to remove boxes because the bees aren’t touching them. For the longest time, my boxes were getting heavier every time I lifted them. Now they’re getting lighter as if they were gorging on honey and about to swarm, but there are no swarm signs. That seems like a dearth to me.

I get the feeling that the massive honey harvest I got from my one beeyard (one beehive really) might be as good as it gets for me this year. It’s weird.

The strange thing about the nectar dearth — and I’ve seen this before — is the abundance of pollen the bees are bringing in. The bees can’t just turn off their hoarding instincts when the nectar dries up, so they seem to switch to pollen instead. I found frame after frame in some of my boxes that are heavy with pollen and bee bread. At first they feel like heavy honey frames, and then I look at them and they’re packed with glistening pollen — more pollen than the bees will need for a long time.

The last time this happened, four or five summers ago, the population in my most of my colonies exploded in August — which is a weird time for colonies to explode. That was the year I heard people reporting swarming happening into the fall. So maybe I should anticipate an explosion of foraging and honey production soon. I’m guessing here.

In any case, I’ve never bothered harvesting pollen from my hives before, but I think I might invest in a few high quality pollen traps for next year (not the plastics ones) so that if I don’t get any honey because of this whacked out weather that’s left most of my hives full of pollen instead of honey, well, at least I might have a chance of selling pollen to offset the costs of this absurd hobby of mine.

That’s my big thought of the day.