The bone-dry weather also puts bees in serious trouble. Because there is hardly any nectar in the flowers, beekeeper Marcel Horck has to feed his bee colonies with sugar. A lot of sugar. “They can’t make their winter stock. If I don’t do anything, the bees will all die from October.”
The beekeeper has half a million bees along the track at Berkel-Enschot. He arrives at his bees with a van full of sugar. “I bought another 100 kilos of sugar from the supermarket. I am already at a thousand kilos this year, probably it will be 1500 kilos at the end of the summer.”
“It’s just gone.”
With the drought of recent months, the bees are no longer able to get a gram of nectar, so they are hungry. “It’s just gone,” concludes Horck. “During this period, we always give the bees some extra sugar water as winter food. But now I feed half more because of the drought.”
We don’t have to worry about the supply of honey, because it has already been ‘harvested’. According to the beekeeper it was a very good year. “The first honey is harvested from mid-May, the last we do around mid-July. After that, we no longer take honey, the bees take nectar now to survive and to replenish the winter supply.”
But there are concerns about how the bees will survive the winter. In mid-September, each bee colony needs about fifteen kilos of honey to survive the winter. “In July they still had ten kilos of honey left after the harvest. Now there is only two kilos left, it has become more normal. They just run out of winter stock.”
“If I don’t do anything now, they’ll die this winter.”
There are still beautiful purple flowers in the field in front of the beehives, but because of the drought there is no nectar in those flowers. “So the bees can’t get anything. I’ve never experienced this before,” says Marcel, while giving sugar water to his bees. “If I don’t do anything now, they will die this winter. Then they literally starve to death.”
So as long as he and his colleague are feeding beekeepers, there is nothing to worry about. “I just have to spend extra money on sugar and drive up and down more often to feed them.”
What we do notice is that there is hardly any heather honey this year. “This year the heath does not produce honey, so we can forget about heather honey,” the beekeeper knows. “I didn’t go to the heath either, it’s just dust there. Normally it should be wet when we put the bees on the heath and dry when they have made enough honey.”