What Every Beekeeper Needs To Know In JULY

Here's all the questions you should be asking yourself as a beekeeper in July. Question number 1, have you finally got swarming under control? Now we're into July, we're past the summer solstice, which means the days are getting progressively shorter now. It takes a few weeks for the beekeeper to be able to see that, but the queen will already know what's going on. There will be a reduction in the amount of laying, there'll be a reduction in the amount of eggs, the amount of brood, but you're probably not going to see that until the back end of July. So what that means for you is that although you've got the trigger of shorter days potentially reducing down the swarming impulse. For the beekeeper, that really doesn't apply in July. You're likely to see that in August and September and October, but you can treat July pretty much as swarm central. Not quite as bad as May, not quite as bad as June, just a little bit less. But there's so many worse things coming in July. The bees will keep you on your toes. So when I say, have you got swarming under control? Have you got a plan? Did you stick to your plan? Were you going from 1 colony to 2 colonies to 4? Were you going to wait for the colony to produce queen cells and then maybe do an artificial swarm and split them down, knock down all the cells and just leave Or were you going down the route of doing a vertical split like a Demeray and dealing with that swarming impulse all on a single floor? That is the technique that we try to use, and I have to say this year it's been really good. Now, if you're watching this in early July, I would say you're still very much in perfect territory to do a Demeray. This will not apply towards the back end of July, this will not apply into August, so it really is the last chance saloon if you want to do a Demeray. Demeray is super simple, especially if you're on a single brood setup. Imagine this, you've got a brood box, queen excluder, and 4 supers on top, and you're thinking, it doesn't get any better than this. This is brilliant. I've got 4 supers of honey. I really hope they don't swarm. And then the wasps come in and then the robbing bees come in and they steal all of my honey. So you can double down on that wasp defense now by improving the size of that brood nest by artificially increasing it. The Demaray does that very, very nicely. So this is what you do. You take everything off the stand apart from the floor. You get a brand new brood box full of foundation and you place that on the floor. Take out one frame and then go through the original brood box, find a queen on a frame of capped brood, and place that into the gap on the brand new brood box that's full of foundation. You then put your queen excluder on, you then put your 4 supers back on, you then take the brood box, the old brood nest, and take it all the way up to the top. There'll be a single frame gap that you fill with a frame of foundation. And then all you have to do is 8 days later, come back, top box, take down any emergency cells that they create. Sometimes they don't create any. And then you've probably got an additional 2 weeks So that first 8 days plus 2 weeks where the bees are, if you do it properly, very, very, very unlikely to swarm. So if you're watching this in July, say you're watching this video back end of June, first week of July, and you're thinking, well, I'm in that situation, I've got a brood box, I've got 4 supers, is the Demaray right for me? I don't think you could time it any better. If you go ahead and do the Demaray now, and especially if your brood box is not tainted with Apivar or Amitraz and you can harvest honey from your brood boxes, then that one where you lift it up to the top, I would say you are very likely to fill that box with honey. That's an extra 40 pounds of honey. That's an extra 80 jars of honey. And you can sell that honey for easily £5, £6 a jar. So it's potentially going to save you like £500 or £600. Now, I teach all of this in my online beekeeping course, 14-Day Beekeeper. Definitely check it out because it will turn you from a beginner into a very competent beekeeper in just 2 weeks. But have you got swarming under control? Have you got a plan? July isn't the month for thinking. July is the month for taking action, knowing exactly what you want to do, And doing your best to keep your bees in the exact number of boxes that you want. That is the skill of being a beekeeper. So next question is, are you still managing the space in the brood nest correctly? Are you going in and monitoring for queen cells? Are you seeing queen cells? And are you taking action if you do see them? Even better than that though, are you managing it efficiently to ensure that there's space up in the supers and sufficient space down in the brood nest so that it doesn't trigger swarming in the first place? Well done if you're doing that. Some of the issues that you might find at this time of the year is that if you let a queen, say, go to mate by itself on an artificial swarm back in May or early June. You've left it for 4 weeks and you've come back and you've found that that queen is not mated. You've left a brood nest completely open and you're coming back in now and you're seeing just honey all the way through the brood nest. You could argue that there's a little bit of mismanagement in there with leaving it so long, but that kind of is the risk you take if you leave queens to mate. Luckily this year though, the weather's been brilliant. Very, very good mating weather in the UK, barring a couple of days that were actually a bit too warm. But you need to keep up with that management in the brood nest for a few weeks more. As we progress towards the back end of July, it's either the last week of July or the first week of August, I don't go and inspect the brood nest anymore. I say no, it's compressing down enough that I think there's more benefit to the bees by me not going in and accepting that the swarm risk has effectively passed. It's— Oh, there's a wasp. And that is just like such a timely reminder. That's not a bee, that is a wasp sniffing around the little mating boxes that I've got down there trying to get in. I think it's because I'm wearing like a green top. It is a very, very keen wasp, that one. But the wasps are here, the scout wasps are here, and you need to take so much caution around the apiary now to make sure that they do not become a real, real nuisance. We'll cover that one towards the end. Continue with your inspections up until, I would say, the middle of July, back end of July. And then for the final 3 or 4 weeks of the season, I don't actually go in and do any inspections in my brood nest at all. I still go around, I'm checking for space up in the supers, and if they need it, I give them additional space, and I cross my fingers and hope they don't swarm. You do end up with additional honey by not going in and tampering with the brood nest, because each time you go in, the bees have got to put it all back right again. They've got to work to fix the damage. They've got to put the propolis seals back in there. So if you don't need to go in and do an inspection, don't go in and do the inspection. It reduces the risk of anything going wrong, reduces the risk of you killing your queen. I will tell you it straight, if you need to go and inspect, you need to go in. And there's certain points in the year where you definitely don't. Back end of July, early August is one of those times. So the wasps are making it all about them today, aren't they? Let me talk about wasps. They are coming, and they are coming to get your bees. It is as simple as that. So your job is to prepare for that onslaught, knowing that it will come. Don't assume that it won't come. And if you're a first-time beekeeper thinking that April, May, and June, and even a bit of July, was really easy and you just saw the odd wasp, believe me, you're going to come down one day and see your colonies obliterated by wasps. But early July, even the back end of June, is the time to prepare your colonies. Make sure they're queen right. Make sure you've got a strong laying queen. Make sure you've got at least 4 or 5 frames of brood. And if you've not got that, add more frames of brood in. You need to bolster the defenses. You need to get bees into the colonies. You need to remove any dead space. If you've got a 12-frame box and you've only got 4 frames in it, that is not going to be good enough to defend against the wasps. You need to reduce the space down. You need to reduce your entrances down. You need to make sure you're not dropping any wax or honey anywhere. And if you're feeding, make sure that you're not spilling any syrup. Go around and check every single box, every brood box, every floor Every super, every roof, and make sure that it is intact. Make sure there's no little wooden knots that have fallen out or the boxes have gone ajar and there's a little gap to get in. The wasps will come, they will find their way in, and they will steal all of your honey unless you do these things. Now, I wish someone had told me that prior to July in my first beekeeping season because I didn't see it coming and all of my honey pretty much got stolen, both from the honey extraction room and also kind of on the supers when I left it on for the bees. So go round and do these checks now. Make sure every single colony is healthy. Make sure every single colony has got a good, strong laying queen. Make sure her brood pattern is good. Make sure there's ample frames of brood. If there isn't, add more. Make sure they've got sufficient food. And then really focus on the defenses. Make sure there's no other way for the wasps to get in. If you've got wasp guards or little wasp defenses that you want to add at this point, you can go ahead and add them. And that gives the bees time to work them out before the wasps become a real issue. Keep some traps just in case. And if you're going to put traps up, you want to put them away from the apiary when the wasps are coming through. You don't necessarily want to trap within the apiary because all you're doing is just attracting wasps into your site, and that is the last thing that you want. I don't go out and trap wasps unless I need to, but I do keep some traps there just in case I come across a nuc or something that's suffering from an onslaught of wasps, and then I can remove the nuc, take it off somewhere else. That's the best thing that you can do— completely new apiary, seal it up, close everything in, take it away, and just place one of your baited wasp traps exactly where that nuc was. It will hoover up all of the wasps and it will stop the problem very, very quickly. So here's a question that you should ask yourself: And not enough people ask themselves this question: are there enough resources in this colony to warrant me trying to save it? You might come across a colony that's on 2 or 3 frames. Maybe it's a failed mating from earlier on in the year and the queen's turned drone laying. Now you come across it and you think, oh, that's annoying, I've got a drone laying queen and she's on 2 or 3 frames. There's half a frame of stores in there, there's a little bit of brood, and it's gone patchy with drone brood. Now most people, me included, when you start out in beekeeping, you think, well, I can fix that. I can find the drone laying queen, I can kill her, I can replace it with a mated queen, and then I'll build that colony back up. It's a colony, so I might as well save it. Now I challenge that mentality. Now we cover this in great detail in 14-Day Beekeeper, that change of mindset. Don't see it as a box. Don't see it as a colony of bees that needs saving. Count the bees in the whole apiary. If you come into the apiary today and say, right, there's a million bees in my apiary, it allows you to think about that conundrum slightly differently, which is, well, I've got a million bees in my apiary and I've got this one box that's not doing very well. Should I try and fix the bees in the box in the configuration that they're in that isn't performing? Or shall I just kind of shake the bees up into the air, take all of the drone brood and the failed stuff away and go and repurpose it, and then go and make a nice fresh split from an adjacent colony that's healthy and can give you that brood? You end the day doing that different manipulation in the apiary with still a million bees. There's still a million bees in the apiary, they're just in slightly different boxes. And when someone showed me this, I thought, that's, that's really clever, because it is, it's exactly the same thing. And what I'm doing is I'm being the beekeeper. I'm saying, well, They failed in the configuration that they're in, so there's no need to keep them in that configuration. Like, I can just do what I said, find the drone-laying queen, kill her, shake all of the bees out into the air, use any usable resources that are in the frames, and then just go and make a fresh split from somewhere else in the apiary. You've got a million bees, you've got loads of colonies to go and make splits from. You can go through the same process. You'll make a split, wait 8 days, take down all the emergency cells, add a new mated queen in, and then let's compare the 2 different things there. One is a very healthy split. A split that's likely to do very, very well. A split that doesn't carry that much risk. A split that's got the correct demographic of all bees. It's got loads of capped brood. It can maintain its heat. It's got young nurse bees to look after everyone that needs looking after in the colony. And then you compare it to the failed drone layer one, which is just a brand new queen with nowhere near enough bees, nowhere near enough foragers, nowhere near enough nurse bees, just tons of drones knocking around and loads of older forager bees saying, what are you doing? Like, that's not— That is not what we need here. We need lots of nice young nurse bees. There's still a million bees. It's just down to you as the beekeeper to set the bees up for success. Now we're talking of wasps. Which one of those do you think is gonna do better against the wasps? Without a shadow of a doubt, it's the one that's set up correctly with the right workforce in place. Keeping that amount of brood in there, keeping that amount of nurse bees in there gives you that defense. It means when the wasps come in, they're much more likely to be challenged. Whereas if you have little piddly colonies and you go ahead and try and fix them by adding in a mated queen and say, come on, mated queen, you need to fix the problem here. Don't be surprised when the wasps kill that queen and they go ahead and just kill the entire colony as well. So changing that mindset is very, very important. And it's July when you have to make these tough decisions. Do I cull a colony there? Do I shake it out? Do I combine them? You might have a colony that's failing with lots and lots of useful resources in it and you think, well, I'm not going to shake them out. I'm just going to put 2 colonies together, sheet of newspaper in the middle, kill the queen, and go through a standard combination like that. Again, something that we teach in great detail in 14-Day Beekeeper. Every single problem, every single challenge has an answer, has a solution, and generally it's a time-served solution as well. It's not someone just guessing, it's someone saying, well, no, this is exactly what you need to do here and this is when you need to do it. That's why this series I think is useful for beekeepers of all ages, because it gives you that advanced warning of what is coming next. So talking of what's coming next, we focused a lot on wasps there, but it's not just the wasps that you have to deal with, it is the robbing bees as well. We spoke in June about all of the rain we got at the beginning and then the sun coming in and compressing that season down. And as we've progressed into July, we're Much more of the same. Made a right mess there. It is very dry. That was the point I was trying to make there. It is just bone dry here. It's not rained for weeks. And in Wales, we're able to cope with that quite well because we are reliant on lots of really deep-rooted plants, deep-rooted bramble, but lots of deep-rooted trees like the one I'm sitting underneath at the moment. So the yield here has been very good. Speaking to others across Wales and speaking to others across England as well, The drought conditions are compressing that season down. So whilst there is a really nice period at the beginning of July now where the sun is out and we're getting lots and lots of forage, it will crash. It will crash and it will go really, really fast. As soon as the moisture dries up, all of the plants will stop. There will be no forage available and the bees will just go into robbing mode. They will start to try and rob each other. Now, I said the compressed season is going to result in me giving you the advice to take your honey off a little bit earlier this year, put your Apivar strips in and start feeding. Now that little combo there helps everyone. Helps the beekeeper preserve their honey, but that is not the reason that I do it and that is not the important bit, but it does help get the honey in the buckets. By predicting an early harvest like that, it means you can take your honey off and you can get your treatments on. Getting ahead of that mite curve at this time of the year pays dividends in the spring, and going in in the middle of August is already going in pretty early. This year my recommendation is going to be to people to go in kind of like last week of July or first week of August, so either 3 or 2 weeks ahead of schedule. Now you're probably going to end up with a slightly reduced honey crop, but those 2 or 3 weeks getting ahead of that varroa curve means that you are going to get brilliant overwintering results. Now the other thing that I recommend, once you take the honey off, the bees are now completely dependent on you. You have to feed them, you have to make sure they have enough food. So we're still going back doing weekly inspections, hefting the box, get used to what heavy feels like, adding in 1:1 sugar syrup at this point in the year. All you're doing here is keeping the bees ticking over. But there is a huge benefit when it comes to robbing bees by having this system in place. Come the end of July, come early August, the wasps are going to be a problem. The robbing bees are going to be a problem. But within your apiary, it should be relatively calm if you're feeding all of the colonies. You shouldn't have an issue with robbing bees because all of the bees are being fed. So there's no need to rob unless you're near loads of other beekeepers. But if you're relatively isolated, it should control all of the robbing. The unintended benefit that you get by feeding the bees, trickle feeding them 1:1 at that point in the year, is that they will continue to expand the brood nest. They'll continue to remain strong and productive. They'll continue to remain very resilient to wasps. If you didn't feed them at this point and you went through the drought and they became robbing bees and they went out and you have all the mortality that's associated with robbing, the colony starts to dwindle like that. There's no food coming in, so the colony dwindles even more. There's even less food coming in and the queen just takes it down to a standstill. That is the point when the wasps will get you. When there's no food, the bees are weak, there's just brood left, and you see the wasps come in and they shred Everything. But by taking your honey off early, back end of July, early August, treating your bees with Apivar or Amitraz, a hard-hitting miticide at that point in the year, and then trickle feeding them through until back end of September, early October, before you switch to 2:1 and get them up to their winter weight, gives you a very, very easy life. It really does, especially if you double brood at that point as well, because you're only trickle feeding a little bit. The bees are probably going to be going out and finding nectar sources as they sporadically become available. Maybe they get some Himalayan balsam, maybe they get some ivy, some late bramble, some rosebay willowherb. All you're doing is just topping it up, keeping them strong, keeping the brood nest nice and healthy, all whilst tackling the varroa mite. You're doing it all at the same time, which means when you come to check your colonies and do the final inspection of the year, probably early October this season, but 8 weeks after you've put your treatments in, you're going to go in, you're going to take your Apivar treatment out, you're going to close everything up, you're going to put the feeder on knowing that all the winter bees are probably going to be in brood form now. You're going to go in heavy 8 to 10 litres of invert sugar syrup at this point in the year. Mix in some Hive Alive, really good for the final feed of the year, especially with invert. It means that it's not going to ferment at all. All that is left to do is just to go back a few weeks later and start to weigh them, put the scales on them. I try and get my nationals up to around 40 kilograms, something like that. When you lift them, they should be heavy. And if you go there with the scales, use it as well to kind of calibrate, see what's going on. Go in, heft one of them, have a guess, and then weigh it and like, okay, maybe my guess was a bit rubbish there. And then when you get it right, you think, oh, that's really heavy. Okay, I think that's up to weight. And if you weigh it and it is up to weight, then you know roughly what it's like. It means that you can go back weekly and kind of like assess what's in the colonies through hefting without actually going in and getting the scales out. Now, all of this advice applies with big full-size colonies, but if you're making nucs at this time of the year, and we make up a lot of nucs in early July, you do need to be really careful to make sure that you're making them up strong enough. So if you're making them up at the beginning of July, I use 2 frames of brood completely capped over, as much brood as you can get, 1 frame of stores, a really good shake of bees, sometimes 2 shakes to bees if the wasp pressure is building already. I take it off to a new site, I wait 8 days, I knock down all the emergency cells, I add in a mated queen, and I feed the bees 1:1 sugar syrup immediately to get them growing. Do not feed them if you're making splits in the same apiary because you will kick off robbing and you will not be able to stop it. So there's all the doom and gloom out of the way. July is a brilliant month as well because it leads into honey extraction. Normally I recommend honey extraction in August, but for this season I'm going ahead and doing it back end of July, early August. So make sure that your bees are ready for it. Make sure that the honey is right. Make sure that you're going to be harvesting honey that's capped over. Make sure you've got everything that you need to actually go out and extract the honey. You've got your uncapping knife, you've got your uncapping table, you've got your honey extractor, you've got a safe, clean environment to do it. Go and check that all of your supers are spaced correctly. Might be a little bit late for July, that one, but you've still got time to get the spacing right. If you've got supers that are running on standard National 4, so self-spacing Hoffman-style frames, and they're all pushed together, You're gonna struggle when it comes to extraction. So what you wanna do, especially if it's not capped already, is get it onto some form of castellations, either 9s or 10s. If you're using foundation, you can use 10s. If you've got already drawn comb, you can use 9s. And all that's gonna do is take the frame like that and just make it a little bit fatter. So when you try to cut the cappings off with a knife, it's much, much easier. Believe me, this will save you hours in the honey extraction room by making sure your supers are spaced correctly frame by frame like that. Do you have your jars ready? Do you have your buckets ready? Do you have your labels ready? There's lots and lots of things and lots of questions that you should be asking yourself In order to prepare for that impending honey harvest. What method of extraction are you gonna use? What method of harvest are you gonna use? Are you gonna blow the bees out? Are you gonna use clearer boards? Are you gonna shake the bees off? Are you gonna use a brush? We like to blow the bees out at Black Mountain Honey 'cause we find it's by far and away the least invasive, which I appreciate is strange 'cause it looks the most invasive, but it's not. There's no impact on the bees. They're just being blown off the combs and then they come and fly back once we've taken all of the honey away. But clearer boards are fine. I wouldn't use porta-bee escapes. Porta-bee escapes are terrible. If you bought a beehive, you're likely to have porta-bee escapes. I would recommend either going with a Canadian cone escape or building a rhombus clearing board. Both of those are much better. Don't leave them in position for too long though. Leave them in position for 24 to 48 hours max. And then this is the biggest tip that I can give you. Biggest question you should be asking yourself is, when should I harvest my honey? And you should do this. You should go out in the morning early as you like, take all of the honey off, go and put it straight into the honey extraction room or your kitchen or wherever you're going to extract it and extract it straight away. Don't leave it. Don't leave it overnight and say, I'll do it tomorrow. Because what happens is when you take it off, It's liquid, it's warm, it's been on a nice warm beehive. It is super easy to extract it at that point. Leave it until the next day, you'll come down, it's thick, it's viscous, it's even stickier, which is crazy because honey is very, very sticky anyway. It doesn't spin out, the extractor becomes unbalanced, you blow out the frames. It's really good advice, yeah. Go out in the morning, take the honey off the bees, get it into your kitchen or your honey extraction room, and get it into the buckets or the jars as soon as you possibly can. So there we go, lots and lots of questions to ask yourself as a beekeeper in July. I'll be back for every single month, but if you want to deep dive into this stuff and get ahead before the monthly videos come out, check out our online course, 14daybeekeeper.com, that answers all of these questions in really great detail.