There are useful inspection opportunities at first across the UK, although conditions become less helpful in several areas later.

Forage is the bigger concern. Practical forage access is restricted across the UK, with wind repeatedly making exposed flowers harder for bees to work in much of the country. Recent dry weather is also reducing nectar reward across much of the UK.

Linked blog about flowers, wind and bees.

Stores pressure is already a concern in south-east England, East Anglia, south-west Scotland and the Highlands, so colony weight and recent intake are worth checking rather than judging the colony only by flight activity.

Nectar collection weakens across much of the UK as the period goes on. Bees may still be flying, but useful intake can fall even while flowers remain visible, so entrance activity on its own can give a misleading impression of what is actually coming home.

Why can inspection weather look fine when colonies are under stores pressure?

A useful point this week is that inspection weather and stores pressure are not the same thing. You can have a perfectly workable spell for opening a hive while the colony is still struggling to replace what it is using. This week, for example, north-east England and Northern Ireland show stores pressure building later even though there are still usable inspection opportunities at times. So a decent inspection window shouldn’t be read as evidence that forage is good. If you do get into a colony, it’s worth looking at usable stores, colony weight and recent intake rather than judging things from flying activity alone.

For autumn feeding, the usual choice is heavy syrup, roughly 2:1 sugar to water by weight, when a colony genuinely needs to put on stores and bees are still active enough to take it down and process it. It’s better for building winter stores than thin spring syrup. Once conditions become too cool or unsettled for colonies to process syrup reliably, fondant becomes the more practical option. Fondant is especially useful as a late-autumn or winter insurance/emergency feed because it can sit directly above the cluster and doesn’t require the colony to handle as much water. It can also be used earlier if a colony is short and you don’t want to add more liquid feed, but for actually building substantial stores in autumn, heavy syrup is usually the first choice.

In this episode

We look at weakening nectar collection and what it could mean for autumn stores, where stores pressure is building and where inspection opportunities become harder to find later in the period.

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Apiary Forecast gives you local inspection, forage, stores and queen-mating guidance for your own saved apiaries. There’s a two-week free trial, and the current Founder Offer is £25 a year rather than £35; UK beekeeping associations can also contact us for a member discount code.