It seems strange that here in central Florida, 3 hours south of the Georgia border, our bees are 3 weeks behind bees in Pensacola and Lake City in Florida, and Way Cross in Georgia. We have beekeeper friends in all of these locations who can tout robust brood nests and plenty of drones.Here in Sumter County, our colonies have been living on the dole for the last 3 weeks. You’ll notice a lot of 3’s in this paragraph, it’s not our lucky number this year. We’ve decided to put off our first batch of mating nucs, and that means we have to throw away more than 600 perfectly good cells. It hurts to do that, but the reality is, our virgin queens would have to fly to the Georgia state line this season to find adequate drones to mate with.
The first group of nucs are always our cushion. These queens go into the bank the week before the first shipping occurs and they give us some insurance against the bad take in the weeks to come. This year, we’ll have to do without that cushion. It might mean we can’t fill all the queen orders on the time promised, but it’s always better to send a customer a queen that, to the best of our knowledge, is well mated and at the peak of health. Raising queens is just like growing any other crop, always susceptible to weather and climate anomalies.
This year’s late maple bloom caused by the unusually warm winter that we discussed last week has ironically put us behind in the brood nest. We are catching up rapidly, feeding pollen cakes at a furious pace and manipulating combs to encourage more brood and especially more drones. We only hope all of our customers understand that sometimes things happen that are just really out of our control. Beekeeping is like that. It’s the beekeeper that understands what “subject to change” means that can adapt and still keep a good attitude and get up in the morning looking forward to the day’s work. That’s why subject to change has always been our family’s moto. It keeps us all smiling. I only wish they would have done more to keep my hair on my head.