Harvest Season

The days are getting shorter, the nights are getting longer. The bees are looking for ever last drop of nectar they can find. This is a fun time of year. Harvest season is upon us. This year was the first year we had larger colonies to produce honey with.

We had the three larger colonies. The calm gentle hive that only would be protective when brushing bees. The spits two hives we made from one. These three hives along with some help from  6 other smaller hives produced 460lbs of honey this year. Don't worry there is plenty of honey still in the hives for the bees. We purchased a two frame extractor this summer. Just so we could extract and put the frames right back on the hives. We pulled the same frames 2 times with honey stores. By doing this we gave the bees less work to do and more resources to fill nectar in the comb. It was a vary busy summer. It seam that ever other night we had things to do in the bee yard.

We are looking at creating systems so we are not in the bee yard so much. Will see as we grow the apiary the hive count with increase and it takes time to build bees. I feel that our honey sales will put us on track to increase by 20% next year. This will bee good as we already have the equipment for the increase in bees.