In this video Laurence Edwards explains why he no longer harvests a spring honey crop from his colonies, a practice he followed for four to five years. He begins by describing the conventional belief that bees will consume the spring honey if left untouched, leading beekeepers to harvest it and then feed the colonies to avoid a "June gap." Edwards recounts his own experience of taking spring crops, the labor and cost of feeding (sugar syrup preparation, diesel, risk of contaminating supers) and the difficulty of balancing feed with honey stores. He then outlines his new approach: instead of removing spring honey, he provides ample space for the bees by adding boxes, using demerets, and lifting brood, ensuring a large, strong colony entering the summer. This space management, combined with the retained spring honey as a buffer, allows the bees to forage heavily in the summer, resulting in slightly higher annual honey yields (a modest £5‑£6 increase) while eliminating the need for spring feeding and reducing labor. Edwards notes regional differences—southern beekeepers and oilseed‑rape situations may still require spring harvests—but for his North Wales apiary the method works well. He acknowledges a downside: the spring and summer harvests become blended, losing the distinct flavor profiles prized by hobbyists, yet he argues the efficiency gains outweigh this for larger‑scale operations.
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For years I took a spring crop from all of my colonies because I thought if the bees have made it, I'm going to take it. I never ever take a spring crop anymore. In this video, I'm going to tell you why. So as I said in the intro there, every single year I always used to take a spring crop because I kind of thought, well, the bees have made that honey. If I don't take it, they're going to eat it. They're going to take that honey. You're going to get a June gap. It's going to disappear. And then why wouldn't I go and take it? I'll take it, I'll feed them if they need feeding, hopefully I'll leave them just about enough, but it's really hard to get that balance right, and then we can go into summer, they can create loads more honey, and then everyone is happy. I did that for about 4 or 5 years, and then I realized that, you know what, I'm making a big, big mistake here. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that everybody who takes a spring crop is making a big mistake. People down south definitely take a spring crop because it's very easy to take a spring crop down there, and they'll get a very, very big spring crop. So if they get, say, 4 supers, maybe they'll take 2 or 3 supers, leave a super on, and then monitor the bees. Also, if you're doing a crop like oilseed rape and it's going to set in the frames, you've got no choice, you have to take a spring crop. But I've found not taking a spring crop has actually resulted in my averages going up, yearly averages going up, by not taking that spring crop, which is quite strange and quite counterintuitive because you'd think if you took the honey away Then the bees need to go out and go and forage more honey to get them back up to a level where they've got enough going into winter. So you almost turbocharge the bees, you turbocharge the queen to lay more, to get the numbers up so they can go and forage more honey. And I just found it didn't work like that at all. And in my experience, the overall averages have gone slightly up by not taking the spring crop. So what you can see in the background there is a very, very tall hive. And a lot of the colonies down at this apiary are like that. They get very, very tall. So what I'm doing all the way through the difficult part of the year, April, May, into June, before we get to the solstice, is I'm giving the bees additional space. I'm adding boxes on, I'm doing demerets, I'm lifting brood, I'm manipulating my boxes around. And okay, you look at that stack of bees there and it's not full from top to bottom, but I'm manipulating the bees and making sure they've got sufficient room to get up to these super strength colonies, which means that it doesn't matter that I don't take the spring crop. Because they leave behind enough of the spring crop to keep them going through the hard spell, through the June gap. But the big thing that it means is that I have such a huge amount of bees going into the summer, into the summer crop, that they go out and they forage so much that it doesn't matter that I've not banked the spring crop, because there's so many bees there that they just go absolutely wild and they bring in so, so much honey. The other part for me is that I kind of thought, well, you know what, I'm going to take a spring crop from my bees and then, okay, I'll need to go in and do a little bit of feeding. But I never really factored how much time that was actually going to take me, how much effort it was going to take. Obviously, you've got the cost of the sugar if you're going to make it into syrup yourself or you're going to buy invert sugar syrup. The time, the effort mixing that up, the diesel cost in driving that round, the time in actually going and administering that into your colonies, feeding your colonies, making sure that you're not contaminating the boxes that are there. It was a huge amount of work. It really was quite difficult. And then you get to a point where you've got these boxes that are contaminated with sugar syrup, and then you go to put your supers back on, and it is difficult not to get any cross-contamination in them. So for me now, I never ever feed when there is a super on. Doesn't matter what time of year it is, I will not feed a colony if it's got a super on. And I will delay putting the supers on to make sure that the colonies have got enough feed And they're nice and strong. Always keep that buffer in the brood area. So not taking a spring crop gives me 2 really key benefits, and it's why I continue to use that method. First benefit is that I never have to feed when the supers are on. There's never any spring feeding, and there's never really any risk that your bees are gonna starve. So you don't lose any bees. No bees die. You've got such a good buffer. You've got the entire spring crop as your buffer. And for me in North Wales, That means that the colonies will never ever starve unless you've got like the worst, worst possible year and you're into kind of emergency feeding. The second benefit is because you're giving the bees so much space and you're doing the manipulations is that when you go into the summer crop, you've got so many bees that they go out and they collect more honey throughout the course of the year than if you weren't to go ahead and take that spring crop. Now I'm not suggesting you're going to get kind of £20 or £30 more here. I'm talking maybe 5 or 6 pounds more, but it saves me a lot of time. It really does save me a lot of time, and there's no way that I would ever go back to taking a spring crop. Now, there's definitely some negatives to it as well. It means that your spring and your summer crop do become a blended crop, so you don't get the distinct differences, which I think is a very nice thing to have, especially at a hobby level. I know people that extract frame to frame, and they get completely different honeys each in the different jars, and it does work really well, and it is nice to get that variation between the jars. But when you start to deal with bigger numbers, you really do look for efficiencies, and one of the biggest efficiencies I've found is not taking a spring crop, and it really has made my beekeeping life so much easier.
