Is it spring outside your window?
In the UK, it was a cold March but the promise of spring was in the air.
This left Matt with mixed emotions. He was getting grumpy about how long the winter was dragging on – he missed his beautiful workers and fiery queens! Compared with last year, March 2026 was dreary for beekeepers, with far too much rain and temperatures stubbornly remaining just a touch too low. It has to be consistently above 14°C-15°C for it not to be inconsiderate to open up a hive for inspections. However, these March days of 10°C-13°C meant it was warm enough that the time when Matt could see his bees felt tantalisingly close…
Over winter, Matt took care of his bees by:
- providing fondant to keep them well fed.
- performing the winter oxalic acid treatment. This means he attacked the parasitic Varroa destructor that terrorises honey bees. During the winter, the queen bee stops laying eggs, so the only place for the Varroa mite to live is on the bodies of adult bees. These body-dwelling mites are known as phoretic Varroa and are the target of the winter oxalic acid treatment. You can read about methods for killing Varroa in ‘Destroy the destructor‘.
- preparing for when the weather is warmer. He used a steamer to melt an abundance of wax from the frames and deep cleaned all his beekeeping equipment, including scraping and scorching the boxes. Now all his supplies are at the ready for when the bees start raising the summer workforce!
While longing to be reunited with his bees, Matt had another job to complete and it was his least favourite thing to do: he had to find out which families he would not be seeing again.
First, Matt travelled to Windmill Hill and I’m very sorry to report that he discovered Hive H had perished. This was one of the swarms he collected last year and they proved to be impressively productive, filling an entire super with honey in just two weeks!
So, what happened? How did they die?
Matt was confronted with mouldy frames and brown streaks when he opened up the hive. That told him that one of the contributing factors was almost certainly nosema. Nosema is a disease that affects a bee’s digestive system. It prevents the bee from properly absorbing nutrition, leaving her malnourished and weak, and she does something a bee would normally never, ever do: she defecates inside the hive. A healthy bee will wait for as long as necessary, even months!, to take a cleansing flight. But a bee affected by nosema cannot help it and, in such dirty surroundings, the disease rapidly spreads throughout the colony.
At The Old Church, Matt found no dead colonies, but he discovered that one family was very close to dying off. Inside Hive F was a tiny cluster of bees huddling together. If they’d stayed, there would have been no hope for recovery so they would have simply shivered miserably through their remaining days. Matt couldn’t stand the thought of them needlessly suffering, so he took action and shook them out of their home (on a relatively mild day!) to force them to move on. He hopes they found a way into neighbouring hives to start a new life.
This colony, just like the colony at Windmill Hill, had plentiful honey reserves, so Matt knows starvation wasn’t a factor in why they didn’t manage to survive the winter. Hive H and Hive F were both well cared for. It’s hard to accept these losses.
In terms of statistics, Matt’s 28.5% colony loss is almost something to be relieved about compared with the rumoured national average of 40%-50%. But any colony death is devastating, so it’s important to reflect on what happened and learn how to do better next year.
And, if the National Bee Unit confirms that British beekeepers really did lose almost half their colonies this winter, then that is a shocking increase on the previous winter’s 20.8% average. The beekeeping community will need to have some serious discussions about what went wrong.
Actual Honey will be participating in this conversation in next week’s blog post.
