The Importance of Floral Calendar in Beekeeping

Floral Calendar is a timetable that provides flowering dates & duration of pollen & honey plants. Follow these 6 steps to personalize your calendar.

Have you ever heard of a personalized Beekeeper calendar? What does it mean and what could possibly be the use of it? — One of the main goals of Beekeepers is to determine the best time to forage and they do this in part by keeping an annual record of the bee’s behavior in order to develop what we call the Beekeeping Floral Calendar.

During the year, honeybees acquire nectar from flowering flowers, which are the source of both raw honey and pollen. Many plant species hold, inside their flowers near the base of the petals, glands called nectaries, which produce nectar. The concentration of sugar in nectar depends on factors like the plant species and variety, soil type, time of day of collection, temperature, and relative humidity.

Plants with a higher sugar concentration in their nectar are relatively more attractive to bees than those with weaker nectars. Thus, for beekeepers, to understand what kind of flowers are available for their bees from January to December, it is crucial to maintain a floral calendar.

Why Does a Beekeeper Need a Floral Calendar?

The Floral Calendar is a timetable that provides the beekeeper with tentative flowering dates and the duration of important pollen and honey plants. Constructing a floral calendar takes a lot of time, but it is considered a vital exercise for any beekeeping enterprise to function accurately.

A floral calendar takes into account the seasonal changes in the vegetation patterns, the foraging behavior of bees, and the manner in which the honey colonies interact with their floral environment. The calendar’s hands-on value is ascertained by how accurately a beekeeper records the beginning and end of a flowering season of the plants and how that affects the bees.

Beekeepers miss out on a lot of raw honey in bulk if they do not realize the importance of a floral calendar. Maintaining a calendar enables them to know dates and duration of the blooming periods and prevent them for missing out on important quantities of raw honey in bulk.

6 Quick Steps to Developing a Floral Calendar

Preparing an accurate calendar will take several years of continuous recording and fine-tuning of the information obtained. To ease the arduous process, take cues from the following steps to develop a floral calendar.

Step 1:

Survey — The first step is to take a general survey of the proximate area by drawing up a list of the flowering plants whilst paying special attention to plants with a high floral population density per area or per tree.

Step 2:

Locating Bee Colonies — Place strong colonies of bees in the area, inspect the hives regularly, and duly observe changes in the amount of food stored within the hive to ascertain whether it is reducing, stable or increasing. The beekeeper can monitor any food gains or losses accurately by checking the weight of the hives.

Step 3:

Analyzing Plant Species — This step involves recording the species of plants that the bees visit in the vicinity of the apiary and within the flight range of the bees which should be in nearly a radius of 3 km (1.86 miles).

Step 4:

Determining the Nectar Concentration — In this step, a beekeeper must determine whether the plants are visited for nectar or pollen. Pollen foragers usually have pollen pieces attached to their hind legs. A beekeeper will have to squeeze the abdomen of individual bees to get a drop of regurgitated nectar, taste it for sweetness, or can measure the nectar concentration with a hand refractometer to conclude whether the bees visited flowers for the nectar.

Step 5:

Frequency of Bees Visit — A beekeeper should ascertain the frequency with which the bees visit each flower species. A continuous increase in food stores, in direct response to the accessibility of the plants visited shows that the plants are a good forage source and vice versa. Also, one must record all the changes in the flowering of the plants visited. Beekeepers can conclude that when the colonies begin to lose weight, the flowering season is finished for all practical purposes.

Step 6:

Forecasting Weather Conditions — Lastly, a beekeeper must record the weather conditions. Under this step, one must answer questions like when do the rains/dry seasons begin and end? How do the seasons relate to the flowering of the bee plants? This step also involves making notes of the bee behavior in the calendar by answering questions like when do bee colonies migrate to the area. When do the colonies swarm, or abscond?

Educating Beekeepers

For a beekeeper to be successful, having a fundamental education in beekeeping is primary. BeeHively Group offers training to tribal beekeepers in the forests and jungles of in India, Bhutan, and Nepal. Tribal communities can harvest honey thrice a year from natural hives while keeping sustainable practices and not affecting the environment. Apart from beekeeping training and education, the Group also caters to the demands of raw honey in bulk and provides its clients with quality, timely delivery, and neat packaging solutions.