Beekeeping Diary
What is happening?
Welcome to our apiary.
We would like to give you an insight into how we keep our bees and produce our honey.
On this page we aim to frequently show you what’s happening in the apiary, so you can be part of the process. We would like to know where our food comes from, very often we don’t , so hopefully at least we’ll be able to show you where your honey comes from.
March April 25
The season starts very early this year with the weather being so mild and sunny.
One of my little colonies on a tree-stump fell over, the queen died so it’s time to start making some early queens. It is a bit of a gamble, potentially too cold and not enough nice days for the virgin queens to mate.
We’ll give it a go anyway.
We won’t let a pollen grain go to waste.
November 24
One of the last tasks of the season, finding the queen and caging her. Without bee-brood varroa mites, viruses and other diseases wont be able to establish themselves during autumn and winter. The queen is safe and gets a break. As a principle I try to keep interference into a bee-colony at a minimum. But with the warmer winters we’ve got now, the bees will otherwise have no period of rest left during the year.
Have to catch up with our diary now, Sorry for the delay the bee-season is just too busy to sit in front of a computer.
June 30 24
Finally in June the weather improves and the bees get crazy. They are determined to catch up with what they haven’t been able to do so far this spring.
As a consequence the beekeeper can hardly catch up with all the jobs that need doing. The days around the 30th got quite hot and I failed to realise that the entrance on one of my strongest hives was not wide enough.
The colony overheated and left the hot inside of the hive and subsequently failing to cool the chamber. The result is Honey-wine in the hive, unfortunately the overheated honey fermented and the wax melted so the harvest of this colony for the year spoiled. There is no way I get the fermented honey out to make sure the harvest of the remaining season meets our quality standards.
Of course one could just pasteurise the honey, but as we only sell raw, unadulterated honey it will have to go into a barrel and become lovely honey wine. It would be nice to be able to sell our self produced Mead, but unfortunately the cost of all the licences makes it impossible for small producers. If you’d like to make your own Mead click here and learn how to do it at home with marvellous results.
May 24
Cold and windy still, I’m still feeding my bees. In the spring it has to be honey for them, we don’t want remains of sugar syrup ending up in the honey. If we don’t want to compromise the quality of our product we have to make sacrifices 😇.
We’ll make some queens in the meantime. It is risky as the queens need good weather in three weeks time to fly out and be mated.
Sadly I lost two colonies due to lack of nectar, I was too late to save them.
April 05 24
It’s too cold the bees can’t get to the flowers, even right in the middle if the fruit trees.
March 14 24
With the first few hours of sun the bees can’t wait to get out after the long cold, wet winter. In early spring they urgently need to find pollen to raise their babies, and water to liquify the crystallised winter-food.
