Well it’s that time of year again. Just as we enter swarming season we also have oil seed rape coming into flower. The bees will need a few weeks of good care to ensure we don’t loose a swarm or struggle with set honey.
Coming home from work last week down the lane to Smithy Brook I could see a couple of fields of oil seed rape just starting to turn yellow. Within a week they will be a sea of gold, accompanied by that intense scent it gives off and I’ll be getting that itchy nose that goes with that quantity of pollen surrounding my home.
For the bee keeper oil seed rape is both a great opportunity and also a potential problem. Nature doesn’t normally provide such a condensed source of pollen and nectar as a field of rape will. Bee’s love it and will fly straight past other, closer, sources of nectar to harvest it. So if it’s growing in the vicinity of your bees then your bees will most certainly be visiting it and returning home with full pollen sacs and a plentiful supply of nectar.
This of course is great news for honey flow and I’m well prepared with extra supers ready to add to the hives as needed. The plentiful supply of pollen is good for the bees to use to draw out new comb so I am adding a couple of frames of foundation in to each super along with frames of drawn comb.
The potential down side to oil seed rape honey is due to it’s high sugar content. Rape makes a fantastic well flavored honey but does have a tendency to crystallize or set in the honeycomb. This can make it impossible to extract by normal spinning methods. Not a problem if you want cut comb honey but that isn’t my thing.
The honey doesn’t usually set whilst the bees are still working it, the heat from the colony helping to keep it fluid. However once it is capped and the bees have moved on to working other frames it can rapidly set as it cools down. Like most other bee keepers I like to get my rape honey off the hive and extracted as soon as it is ready rather than trying to leave it until the end of the season when it will surely be set. It is therefore a matter of good judgement, not removing too soon when the water content may still be too high causing it to ferment in the jars, nor leaving it too long so it sets. Normally I wouldn’t remove honey until the bees have finished capping it off so I can be sure it is ready and the water content low enough. However the high sugar content of oil seed rape and the risk of setting means I will normally decide it’s safe to extract once we are above 90% capped.
Lot’s of bee keepers rely on borrowing an extractor from their local bee keepers association and need to organise this early if they have rape growing locally. Unfortunately this year with Covid 19 it seems many associations are not lending out equipment at the moment. This is going to cause quite a few problems. Luckily I invested in a reasonably priced extractor many years ago when I first began bee keeping so I’m all ready to go. I should be seeing the first 2020 honey crop within the next few weeks!
Of course getting it off the frames and into tank or jars whilst still fluid won’t prevent it setting later as it cools. I personally don’t have a problem with set honey for my own use and neither do quite a few customers. However clearing the honey and keeping it liquid is not a difficult task and can be done quite simply by heating it up. I will be covering this in a later post.
