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The weather conditions this summer prevented Swiss bees from producing honey and even had to be artificially fed, Swiss national channel SRF reported on Saturday.
This content was published on October 2, 2021 – 18:29
SRF / jc
If the bees had not been given the sugar water, many would likely have died, Martin Schwegler of the national bee association Bienen Schweiz told SRF.External link. There were also exceptionally few wasps this year, he added, and they too may have struggled from lack of food. But he’s mostly concerned about wild bees, which aren’t artificially fed by humans. “We probably need to care more about them than the 200,000 or so honey bee colonies that beekeepers care for.”
First it got wet for a long time, then suddenly it got very dry again. “It turned everything upside down,” explains Thomas Wegmüller, president of the Federation of Bernese Beekeepers Associations. “Then when the plants were in bloom, the bees couldn’t fly because it was raining.” The spring honey harvest was almost a complete failure, and it is now certain that the summer harvest will be poor as well, reports SRF. Only in the canton of Ticino and at altitudes above 1000 meters above sea level were the conditions for bees better.
Beekeeper Schwegler says he had to feed his bees already in the spring with sugar water so that they could produce enough honey, but they needed the honey for themselves and there was hardly any left for humans. Normally, the 18,000 or so beekeepers in Switzerland only feed their colonies in winter.
