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Counting My Blessings
It is nice to experience an exceptionally good honey
crop every once in a while despite the climate extremes
By: Ross Conrad
The 2025 season was a wild one for me in the Champlain Valley of Vermont. It started out with rather high Winter losses (approx. 30 percent), got swamped with rain in Spring and then turned super dry during the Summer. Despite the roller coaster ride, my bees somehow managed to gather the largest honey crop I have ever harvested. A great honey year does not happen in these parts all that often but it is welcome when it does.
As much as I’d like to say that my bumper crop was a result of my decades of experience, along with my vast knowledge, intense study and commitment to beekeeping, the reality is that I am not so much a great beekeeper as a lucky one. After all, I treated all my colonies the same as I have always done in the past, only this time with much better results. Thanks to the notes I take of significant observations and manipulations during each apiary visit, I can report on my experience with accuracy.
Ideally a swarm should issue from a hive just before a major nectar flow is about to start. This year I was lucky enough to capture a swarm that hit that timing perfectly. Photo Credit – Ross Conrad, Dancing Bee Gardens
The 2025 season here in Vermont’s Champlain Valley started out with an extremely wet Spring. A big March snow storm, frequent rains and Spring snow melt all contributed to making it extremely hard for those farmers who have adopted some of the same practices used by industrial agriculture, to get out onto their fields. If they are not careful, their large tractors and heavy equipment can cause soil compaction and rutting, not to mention hours of wasted time from simply getting stuck in the mud. Normally farmers like to cut their clover and alfalfa just before the plants bloom when the protein content is highest. Unfortunately for them, they were not able to so this year. As a result, the various legumes dairy farmers grow, from clover and trefoil to alfalfa and vetch, was in bloom for many more weeks than usual.
Then around mid-June the rains finally stopped and the fields dried out. Farmers had the chance to harvest their first cut of hay right when the majority of the clover blossoms were turning brown and going to seed, thereby rejuvenating the plants to bloom a second time. This second bloom again lasted much longer than usual due to the extreme drought that followed the heavy rains. During drought conditions, it is recommended that farmers leave their forage crops a minimum of 4-6 inches tall in order to help successfully support the plants through the stress of the dry conditions. In addition, new plantings in their first year should not be cut at all during dry conditions for the same reason. So once again, most of the legume crops were left uncut. After the rains finally started back up again in September, we even enjoyed a relatively healthy late goldenrod flow.
Not only did the bees have ideal weather for foraging and ready access to more than the usual number of flowers this season, but apparently hot sunny days like we experienced in my area this year are the sweet spot for white clover and possibly other honey plants as well. In his book Honey Plants of North America, John H. Lovell writes, “At Clarinda, Page County, Iowa, J.L. Strong carefully recorded from day to day for 29 years from 1885 to 1914, the weight of one hive on scales and the weather conditions. White clover is the most important honey plant in this locality. According to an analysis of these statistics by L.A. Kenoyer, the largest amount of honey, or 46 percent, was secured on days when the temperature was between 80-90 degrees F, while 17 percent was stored on days when the temperature was less than 80 degrees, and 37 percent when the temperature was over 90 degrees F.”
It is likely that this observation does not just apply to white clover. Some beekeepers such as Midwest commercial beekeeper Charles Linder, have found that soybeans can yield extra heavily when conditions are on the dry side. According to Charles, soybeans have auxiliary nectaries, and are typically planted close together so they naturally provide a canopy that shades the ground helping to prevent rapid soil evaporation. In addition, during the transition to extreme drought, some plants will push to develop seeds in a last gasp for survival further increasing nectar production. Of course there has to be some moisture in the ground in order for plants to produce nectar, and so any increase in nectar production primarily takes place under moderately dry conditions: exactly the kind of conditions one experiences just before extreme drought sets in.
In many locations, bees use dandelion pollen and nectar to build up the colony’s population so they can take full advantage of nectar flows that come later in the season. Photo Credit – Ross Conrad, Dancing Bee Gardens
The nectar flow was so strong this year that I had one hive that I split in late April and again in mid-May to make nucleus colonies, and the hive still went on to produce seven full supers of honey. I was also fortunate enough to have one of the best swarm catching experiences in memory. The swarm was in the process of coalescing on a tree branch on May 26th, right in front of the place I normally park when I pull into the bee yard. Being somewhat vertically challenged, I turned the pickup truck around and backed into the parking spot so the truck bed was positioned under the swarm, providing me with an elevated platform from which to gather up the bees. I then proceeded to check all the hives in the yard and complete my planned bee work first in order to give the swarm a chance to settle down. Then after shaking, scooping and using smoke to herd the large swarm of bees into a hive body filled with new frames of foundation, I placed the colony on an empty hive stand the bee yard.
When I returned to the yard eleven days later on June 6th, I was pleased to see that not only had the swarm stayed and set up house in the hive I had provided for them, but the bees had drawn out all ten frames of foundation, filled the comb with brood, pollen and nectar, and was in the process of capping the ripened honey that they had stored in the upper most portion of most of the frames. I added a shallow super of foundation and when I checked them again six days later on June 12th, they had drawn out all the shallow frames of foundation, filled them with honey and had most of it capped as well, so I added another shallow super of foundation.
By June 21st , less than a month after catching the swarm, the second honey super was drawn out and almost entirely filled meaning this colony was now well provisioned to survive the Winter without the need for additional feeding. As an additional bonus, the colony’s entire comb inventory is new so the bees will be exposed to the minimum amount of pesticide residues and bee pathogens during their long Winter months of confinement. This swarm then went on to fill an additional 1½ shallow supers of previously drawn comb with honey that I was able to harvest for myself. Needless to say, I have high expectations for this colony in 2026.
While we like to think that we are the masters of our fate and it’s our skill and dedication to beekeeping that makes or breaks the season, this year reminded me that while we do have a significant influence on how well our bees do or don’t do in our care, just as important if not more so, is what happens outside of our sphere of influence. How the weather behaves, along with how the people around an apiary use the land, what they plant, how they manage their property, whether they use pesticides or generate pollution of other kinds, all have just as much if not more of an influence over how well my bees do and how much honey they produce, than what I do as their keeper. This helps to explain why sometimes seasoned beekeepers with decades of experience can have massive annual losses and paltry honey crops, while inexperienced beekeepers who don’t really know what they are doing can have great harvests and 100 percent Winter survival. We can plan all we want but, in the end, it is often dumb luck that ends up being the deciding factor between failure and success.
Sure, the climate destabilization we have created is bad for the majority of people, animals and plants on the planet but it can be good for some, at least in the short term. Still, I would rather experience smaller honey crops if it meant that we could return the climate to some semblance of normal balance. Unfortunately, humanity’s current approach is to give up on correcting our environmental errors and continue to make things worse. Meanwhile we resign ourselves to simply living with an ever-declining environmental situation instead of fixing it by addressing the root causes instead of potentially applying a band-aid.
Not being much of a quitter myself, I do not personally subscribe to this scenario and therefore I continue to do what I can to transition away from fossil fuel use in whatever ways I can. Meanwhile, I am learning to appreciate the difficult years of massive colony losses and paltry honey harvests. The bad years provide a valuable perspective that allow me to truly appreciate the good years for the blessing that they are.
Reference:
Lovell, John, H (1926) Honey Plants of North America, A.I. Root Co., Medina, OH, pg 104
