Wood Anemone.

I was reading an article in The Scottish Beekeeper the other day about feeding bees in the spring. The author is an experienced apiarist but, a little long in the tooth; one of a group that I am likely to be joining soon. His thesis was that the modern youth is far too eager to feed his bees, a practice that is, apparently, of no benefit to the bees, and he quoted the mantra, “Never feed your bees sweet water.” As a tyro, some 35 years ago, it was drummed into me that it’s easy to get a colony of bees to survive the winter – it’s the spring that’s the difficult bit.
 
Ask a bee colony in spring what its ambitions are and it will tell you that it wants to breed and to survive next winter; much the same as every other organism on this planet. A bee colony breeds by swarming so it needs to increase its population enabling it to send away lots of large swarms. It has to do this early to give both the mother colony, and all of its daughters, time to build up their numbers and to store their winter food. The benefits of an early start to producing young bees are enormous - but so is the risk.
 
If you look at your garden now, you should see flowers such as crocuses and daffodils and, while I was out walking today, I found lots of garlic scented plants (you must understand I am not a botanist so can’t name them) and some lovely wood anemones. All of these supply pollen, and therefore, the protein needed for the bee larvae to build new tissue; none of them provide the nectar, the source of the energy that the bees need to forage and keep warm. They are still surviving on their winter honey stores; run out of that and they starve; it will be well into May before the sycamore gives them their first real taste of this year’s nectar.
 
They need sweet water, they need lots of it - and they need it now.