July 2026

Peace and Calm by Alan Riach

Many of you may now be patiently waiting for tardy new queens to start laying. Young queens in strong colonies never seem to be in any hurry. Swarming should now be past, but keep checking.

We had a June Gap but not as severe as last year – at least in my apiaries. The bees in the observation hives in the Honey Tent at the Highland Show ventured out from Wednesday onwards, so there was nectar somewhere.

My own bees had ejected most of the drones but are now back to normal as the lime and bramble have started yielding.

Time to start thinking about preparing for the heather. The heather moors require really populous colonies, and the Pagden swarm prevention method chimes well with this requirement. The old queen in the artificial swarm can be removed and the colony united with the new queen colony. New queens are desirable as they continue to lay later on in the season, keeping up numbers on the hard-worked heather gatherers. See the doc on Preparing For The Heather in downloads.

The bees should be on one brood box and by populous, I mean “boiling over” with bees. Preparing for the heather requires some “outside normal rules” of colony assembly. Place a frame full of stores at one end of the brood box (as an emergency food source in case of bad weather on the moors), then place the young brood next to this frame and next to the side of the box at the opposite side of the brood box, with the emerging brood and laying space in the centre. The placement of the young brood towards the sides is to prevent the bees from starting to place heather honey in these outer frames and to encourage them to place it up in the supers.

If you have no brood frames full of stores, then place a full sealed super frame in the centre of the first super as an emergency food source, but mark it with a drawing pin, so that you don’t later confuse it with frames of heather honey.

Since Ling Heather honey is thixotropic (jellyish but can be made liquid for a few minutes by needle agitation before returning to the jelly form, although commercial equipment is needed to get effective agitation), I usually sell my heather honey as cut comb, a 227g carton of cut comb heather often selling for approximately the same price as a 454g jar of blossom honey. Cut comb feels better in the mouth if you allow the bees to draw the comb. I place a 2cm strip along the top bar (held in place with the wedge but glued in place with a run of melted wax). Any remnants left after cut combing or badly formed combs I press.

The normal time to go to the Ling heather used to be the start of the grouse shoot (12 th Aug), but the heather has been earlier than that in recent times, so we are targeting 18 th July this year. The Bell heather (a non-thixotropic blossom honey with a beautiful port wine colour and distinctive flavour) is already out. 

We are planning a Heather Picnic this year on 23 rd Aug, so look out your apple pie and heather loaf recipes. The heather picnic is always a wonderful season-end event, visiting the heather moor site, inspecting the grumpy bees (bees on the heather are always a bit tetchy), retreating a safe distance, lighting up the Primus stove and having a picnic. I can almost already taste the wonderful sandwiches, apple pies and honey cakes that I’m sure will appear.

Some of you may have ended up with an overabundance of colonies. Uniting with the paper method is the most foolproof method. Choose which queen you want to keep, either dispatching one to that great apiary in the sky or setting her up in a poly Nuc to take through winter. Place paper on the top of the lower broodbox and make a few slits with the edge of the hive tool and place the second colony on top. There is a tendency for the paper to blow off just as you are placing the top box. Use two bulldog clips as weights hanging on the paper, one either side of the hive to keep it in place.

Congratulations to those of you who have sat and obtained your SBA Basic Beekeeping (BB) certificate. The candidates I examined were well up to the mark and we must thank the EMBA mentors for preparing them, so a big thank you to EMBA members who helped prepare candidates. Thanks also to our new BB examiner, Sarah Price, who was initiated into examining this year. If you have not sat your BB, we would encourage you to do so next season.

A big thank you also to all those who stewarded (and competed) in the Honey Tent at the Highland show. Your efforts are much appreciated by the SBA and the Highland Society. And of course, a special thank you to Jill Tidman who organised our EMBA display entry. We had quite a few schools visit this year and EMBA members Gordon Jardine and Peter Shaw did a sterling job in guiding them round the tent. Peter’s explanation of bees has branded him a new star in the Honey Tent. Also to Stephen Readman, who organised the 3 observation hives, always a favourite with the children.

The new EMBA Apiary is now well established and Shona Irvine, a close neighbour and EMBA member, is keeping an eye on things.

I hope that your bees are now settled and industrious and that your summer honey season will be abundant.