Gone with the wind
We beekeepers often talk about rain and temperature, but wind definitely deserves more attention. Around here on the Kintyre, we’re almost constantly battered by it. Along with some other windy regions, we definitely have beekeeping on hard mode.
You might too.
Honey bees are very capable fliers but they’re not little helicopters with infinite fuel. Wind changes the economics of a foraging trip. It makes take-off harder, landing clumsier and flower handling slower.
For the colony it means fewer bees out, fewer flowers visited per minute, and a much less useful forage intake. For beekeepers, it means you need to keep an eye on stores.
Don’t take my word for it though!
A University of Sussex study tested honey bees on artificial flowers while fans produced different wind speeds. The key finding was not that moving flowers confused the bees. They probably weren’t confused by that at all.
The bigger effect was the air movement. As the wind speed increased, bees visited flowers at a lower rate, mainly because they became more hesitant to take off again from flowers. In the Sussex report, take-off hesitation ranged from near-instant to as long as 54 seconds in windier conditions. That’s a huge delay for an animal whose success depends on repeated short trips between flowers.
https://www.sussex.ac.uk/broadcast/read/51341
The take away
The lesson is that wind doesn’t just make beekeeping a bit unpleasant for the beekeeper. It changes whether bees can use the landscape at all. A windy day with flowers is not the same as a good forage day. And that’s why we use wind calculations in Forage Outlook to help you judge stores intake.