John Berry on Timing it Right

It’s much easier said than done, but for beekeepers timing when the important tasks in the apiary are undertaken is crucial. John Berry imparts what he has learned about timing it right over his six decades of time in the hives.

By John Berry

Do everything right, but at the wrong time and both you and your bees will suffer for it.

You can never be perfect and you can never get everything right, I should know I have made enough mistakes over the years, but I have tried to learn from them.

As a beekeeper in New Zealand, John Berry has never had much time for summer holidays – but is that just because the long-bearded-bee-man is moonlighting at a second job…?

Before varroa life was certainly easier, but there was still plenty of mistakes you could make with timing and the more hives you had the easier it was to make them. One thousand hives per person was fairly standard back in the day.

One day late feeding hives in the spring and they can be eating the brood or starved. I hate to think how many hives I have seen starved bees in over the years and how many more have been held back severely by lack of feed. For some reason it hasn’t been such a problem lately, but I remember a period of four years when we had to feed up to the end of November and I have fed bees the day before Christmas. Two of us would feed up to 200 hives a day on eight litres of sugar syrup.

The only positive from that sort of spring is that often a really bad spring is followed by a good season, certainly some of the best springs I have seen have been followed by truly awful summers.

Even kiwi have a holiday on the beach! From avid beekeeper and conservationist John Berry’s personal photos is this evidence of a beach sojourn by a kiwi bird.

Getting your supers on in a timely manner is also vital. Get it wrong and they will swarm or, even worse for your time, they will be raising cells and you have to go through every frame on every hive. Supering up too early can be just about as bad, as it takes a lot of extra time to do any necessary feeding.

It’s unbelievable how quickly hives can jam up with fresh honey on some of the early flows like rewarewa. Get it wrong and you not only have swarming problems but you have also severely constricted the brood nest which will mean less honey later on. Letting hives get choked out with honey too early in the season can have the same effect.

I remember many years ago a beekeeper bringing honey in for extraction at the end of the season and bragging about how full they were. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that our hives in the same area had been just as full two months before and we had got another three full boxes a hive while he had been having an extended Christmas holiday.

Holiday Season Usually Waits

I only once had a two-week Christmas holiday. I could take the time off because we had an early and crippling drought with no honey and no prospects. I spent those two weeks on Little and Great Barrier Island’s where it rained every single day we were away. Terrible weather but an amazing holiday and the start of a love affair with an island.

Little Barrier is one of the most special places on earth. Christmas holidays were certainly not the norm and I don’t remember my father ever having one, although apparently he did when he was younger. The only summer holiday I can remember my father having was when he slipped off a truck deck and got hung under the arm on a rope hook. That got him a few days R&R in hospital.

Little Barrier Island, a protected nature reserve in the Hauraki Gulf, is John Berry’s happy place for a holiday. But summer sojourns were rare when working fulltime as a beekeeper.

Dad’s idea of a holiday usually involved the middle of winter and as much work-related stuff as possible. Helping his brother Russell at Wiotapu, or beekeepers conferences, fitted the bill nicely.

Make the Most of the Good Years

You don’t get good seasons all that often and when you do you need to take full advantage of them. Then maybe you can afford to take a decent Christmas holiday next time you have a terrible season. Getting the timing right when taking off different types of honey is also important as generally monofloral honeys are worth more than mixtures.

Back in the day when we used all of our mānuka honey to feed back to the bees in the spring it really didn’t matter if they had 15kg of mingi mingi already in the honey supers, but now it does and the same goes for mānuka and kānuka. It used to all go in the same pot. Not anymore.

Get a Feel for the Variance

Getting your timing right is easier for someone like my son in Norway where spring, summer and autumn are proper seasons and most flows start within a few days of a fixed date every year. We do not have that luxury and even early flows like willow can vary by close to a month. Crops that need pollination can also have large fluctuations in flowering dates, which can make getting hives ready on time really difficult.

You can’t change the weather or the time of flowering, but what you can do is constantly monitor and the only way to do that is to look into hives. When heading out on a day’s work we would often check two or three apiaries on the way home just to see what was happening. Over the years you build up a knowledge of just how things work, but you still need to keep an eye on things.

Local knowledge is important and I think my beekeeping got better as I ran fewer hives and did all the work myself, not because the people I worked with weren’t any good but because I always got to see the results of what I did and I had more time to get it right.

Every apiary has its own idiosyncrasies; every area is different. I like to re-queen in autumn when conditions around here are much more settled. If I have to raise queens in the spring there is no point in starting before there are drones in the hives and, if you want reasonable matings, you better be finished before the equinoxial gales start up.

When it comes to varroa you probably can’t be too early treating for it, but you certainly can be too late and if you can’t control your varroa on time then you can’t keep bees.

Prioritise, try and do what is necessary on time, but on the other hand try not to be a bee botherer. Learning when not to do anything also involves timing.

Bees are living organisms, change is constant, and you can’t get your timing from a spreadsheet in an office.

John Berry is a retired commercial beekeeper from the Hawke’s Bay, having obtained his first hive in 1966, before working for family business Arataki Honey and then as owner of Berry Bees. He now keeps “20-something” hives.