The beautiful weather allowed the plants to flower vigorously. Good conditions for bees and beekeepers in the southwest. They look forward to a bountiful harvest.
Mayen/Stuttgart (dpa/lsw) – Thanks to sunny days, the Baden-Württemberg beekeepers have harvested significantly more honey this year than in the rainy previous year, despite the extreme drought. On average, beekeepers in 2022 came up with 34.4 kilograms of honey per colony, according to a survey by the Bees and Beekeeping Center in Mayen. After 17.3 kilograms in the same period of the previous year, the amount in the southwest almost doubled. When the sun is shining, plants bloom intensely and there is plenty of nectar for the bees, so there was a lot of yield.
On average, German beekeepers threw 37.2 kilos of honey per colony, 8.9 kilos more than in 2021. The center referred to two surveys on the early and summer forage harvest with reports from a total of 15,700 beekeepers. “It was a good harvest, the beekeepers can be satisfied,” said the head of the specialist center, Christoph Otten. However, last year’s harvest was very low. Overall, this year’s amount would be 2.7 kg above the long-term average in Germany.
Bee expert Otten said the summer’s drought had little impact on the harvest. “By the time the drought began to take hold in July, bees had already harvested most of the nectar and stocked up, as they do every year.” Intermittent rainfall in June in parts of Bavaria, Baden-Württemberg and the Palatinate meant that the bees there collected less harvest than in other parts of the state.
In Germany there are more than 150,000 beekeepers who keep around one million bee colonies. In the vast majority of cases, these are recreational beekeepers. It is estimated that a quarter of the honey consumed domestically comes from Germany, the rest from countries such as Ukraine, Mexico or Argentina.
