Beekeeper Laurence Edwards shows how to tell if your bees are foraging on ivy, the main late-season nectar source in the UK. Look for light-yellow pollen on returning bees' legs, a steady flow at the hive entrance, and the distinctive unpleasant smell of ivy honey. The waggle dance on frames is the strongest sign they've found a rich ivy source.
In today's video, I'm going to show you the dead giveaway that your bees are on an ivy flow. So the ivy for me is such an important plant for the bees within the UK. Often the weather at this time of the year is really, really poor, but you get a day like it is today, early October, when the bees go wild for the ivy. And there's just a few really simple things that you can do to understand if your bees are foraging on the ivy. So the first one and the most obvious one is the pollen, the color of the pollen coming in. If you're seeing lots and lots of activity at this point in the year, kind of anytime from back end of September through to say the end of October, the likelihood is they found the ivy. The pollen is a very, very light yellow color and you will see lots of bees bringing it back at this point in the year. But sometimes you'll only see kind of like 1 or 2 bees coming back in with yellow pollen and you're thinking, well, have they found something else at this point in the year? And in the UK, it's quite simple. There's only really 2 plants that are gonna yield anything decent at this point in the year. Anything that's actually gonna excite the bees enough to get them going like this here. We've got the ivy that's going to have the yellow pollen on the back legs, and then you've got the Himalayan balsam that's a very pale cream pollen, and you're going to see stripes on the back of the bees to indicate that they're foraging on the Himalayan balsam. You might get a little mixture of the both, they definitely do overlap at this point in the year, but there's not really anything else in the UK that's going to give you like a huge amount of pollen or nectar at this point in the year. The next dead giveaway is to go and have a look around at some ivy plants and you will see Like the buds are popping open, yellow pollen showing, and lots and lots of insects on the ivy. It's important for honeybees, but it's very, very important for a wide range of pollinators. You'll see loads of wasps on the ivy as well. You'll see hornets, European hornets, hopefully not too many Asian hornets, but you will see Asian hornets feeding on the nectar and probably having a bit of a stab at some of the insects on it as well. And then the next thing that I would look out for to show that there's definitely an ivy flow going on is the flight path of the bees like this. So at this point in the year, you're likely to get 2 different styles of Activity at the entrance. What you're seeing here is not too many bees buzzing around. If you just saw like loads of bees buzzing around, that's gonna be one of two things. It's either gonna be orientation on a warm day where all of the new young bees are trying to work out where they are and triangulate themselves to this hive. You'll see that with lots of bees buzzing around here, they'll all be facing inwards to the hive and it should be a very harmonious entrance, no fighting. If you are seeing lots of bees buzzing around kind of like on the back and the front, Some facing in, some facing out, and then kind of destruction at the entrance. What you're seeing there is robbing, and you need to take action at that point. Hopefully though, if you've got big strong colonies at this point of the year, they can control that, and you shouldn't have to worry too much about it. If you're seeing what I'm seeing here, which is a continuous flow of bees coming in and a continuous flow of bees going out, and not too much going on around the entrance, that is a sure Fire sign that there is a flow on. So I can see it, you can kind of see it from hives from quite a way away. You see it up in the air as well. You see lots of bees flying up in the air with a real purpose, like they're going for something. They're not just kind of just like buzzing around having fun. There is something going on and they want to go and forage it. And then the final giveaway for me is if you get this close to your colonies, which you can do if you get Black Mountain Honey Queens or Black Mountain Honey Nucs, You can come and kind of spend time with your bees like this. Of course, I would recommend wearing a veil, but I'm trying to talk to the video here and give you a clear explanation. It's not as easy to do that with the veil on, but I know my bees and I know that I'm not going to get stung too badly by sitting in front of the colonies like this. They don't see me as any threat. But what I can do here is I can get this sense of smell. You can smell it, and I don't know whether it's kind of on the bees that are coming in or whether I'm smelling it from the hive, but you really get this sense of smell coming from the ivy flow, and it's not the nicest of honey's ivy, like it's a bit kind of smelly feet smell, but that's the smell that I'm getting at the moment. Now if you were to open up these colonies, which I won't do today, but I have been opening up a few to do various different videos, if you were to open it up, that would be kind of like the final sign. You'd get an overriding smell coming through, and once you can pick it, once you know it's ivy, you know the bees are on the flow. Now what I did do in the colony over there is I was going through just to kind of show some comparisons between double brood colonies like this and single brood colonies next door, and when I pulled out some frames I saw the bees doing the waggle dance, and they were going wild with the waggle dance, and that is probably the best indicator for me to show that there's a flow going on. They're telling the bees where it is. I've got yellow pollen coming in. Without a shadow of a doubt, this is a strong, strong ivy flow. I hope you enjoyed that video. I hope your bees are getting ready for winter well. I hope they're putting on weight. If you did enjoy the video, I'd much appreciate a thumbs up. Hit the subscribe button, and I'll see you next time.
