Bees may flourish after rainy January
Beekeepers know that if bees do well, humans do better. For good or bad, the extreme weather in Texas, exacerbated by climate change, can influence a bee’s ability to pollinate and produce honey, both key to maintaining ecosystems — and an unusually wet January could be a prelude to a flowery spring.
To understand the correlation between weather and bees, we need to understand why honeybees are important to our everyday life.
Bees not only produce honey and medicinal products but also are essential to human agriculture as pollinators. Pollination is crucial for the fertilization and reproduction of plants that produce one-third of our food supply and provide half of the world’s oils, fibers, and other raw materials, according to the environmental group Friends of the Earth.
Honey is produced when bees collect pollen and nectar from blooming flowers, which then gets brought back to a beehive and is broken down into simple sugars inside a honeycomb.
In Texas, we have flowers blooming in the spring and fall, but inconsistent and extreme weather patterns throughout the year can easily disrupt this cycle.
“Bees in Central Texas make the vast majority of their honey in about six weeks, four in the spring and two in the fall,” said Tara Chapman, owner of Two Hives Honey in Austin. “So, if anything interferes with those plants’ ability to produce nectar and pollen, then the bees won’t have a successful year.”
For example, a warm winter can confuse the flowers and cause them to start budding too early, then a winter storm could hit late in the season and either kill the plant or stress it to the point where it won’t produce nectar.
The historic Texas freeze of February 2021 devastated Chapman’s collection of beehives, resulting in a loss of about 40%. While it is typical for her to lose about 5% of her hives annually to disease or other insects, the severe weather conditions proved particularly detrimental.
During winter, bees will rest. They rely on clustering to survive temperatures below 50 degrees. Bees can generate heat through wing movement by huddling together and rotating positions. This clustering activity helps them maintain a temperature range of 80 to 90 degrees within the center of the cluster.
Bees also protect their hive from frigid temperatures by producing a resin-like substance called propolis and using it to glue the hive entrance shut.
For honeybees, everything relies on the availability of resources or the lack thereof, and the only food source for bees is produced through these blooming flowers.
Not all is lost, though, because Texas weather can sometimes have perfect timing, just like the recent rain in January.
“Right now, we’ve had this crazy rain, and as long as we don’t have a late freeze, it’s going to be a phenomenal year for the wildflowers,” Chapman said.