Sunday, October 25, 2015

Update About the Fall Honey Harvest

beehives and blackberries

If you are waiting for honey here's the buzz about what the bees and I are up to around here.

We had a bumper spring/summer harvest but fall isn't looking so great.

honey


  I'm running what I like to call a Micro-Apiary, a small boutique honey operation with limited supplies.

Read about how I got started beekeeping here.

Honey is kind of the Snapchat of products. It's  available for a short time in quantities that the bees determine. Time and tide and honey wait for no man. Or woman. The bees are in charge of production and all the workers are female so they aren't open to a lot of suggestions. Have you tried working with a hundred thousand females? I'm the beekeeper but I'm not really running things.

honey harvest

 Many of the beekeepers who have large enough operations to sell their honey in the grocery store sometimes buy honey from other beekeepers to keep up with demand. Most of the honey is filtered. Once it is filtered it all looks the same on the shelf and it's hard for the consumer to know exactly what they are getting.

 Read about this year's honey harvest here!

Simply filtering out the comb bits isn't bad, it still contains pollen and it allows the bees to get back to making honey for the beekeeper as soon as possible. If you are selling honey in the comb the bees must rebuild all the comb in addition to making honey.

bees

It's a lot of extra work for the bees which is why it cost more. But when you see it you know as a consumer you are getting all the benefits of the honey. If I'm scraping it all off the frame into a jar, it is completely raw and unfiltered. Everything takes place on site. It is artisan neighborhood honey.

honeycomb

This summer the super raw version was all I was selling. I've had so many people request either honey with comb or raw and unfiltered that I provided the most natural honey you can access unless you want to get your own hives (which I would love to see you do!). My hives are chemical free. I'm using only all natural pest controls.

The problem with this delicious scraping honeycomb right off the frame is that the bees must rebuild all the comb before they can get cracking at storing honey for us to take. So the fall harvest is going to be super tiny. Next year expect a return to the extractor so that we can all get more of what we love. 

 capped honey

On the blog you can see pictures of the bees at work making the honey I have available. I post regular updates about how the girls are doing and what is involved in managing them. I'm also willing to give you a tour and answer questions about how the bees work and live and why they are so important to us. Leave your questions or comments in the comment section at the bottom of this post or visit me on my Facebook Page.  


honeycomb

I'm also going to be adding more hives which means more bees and more honey for everyone. The demand is greater than the supply which I think is considered a good thing.

Have a sweet Sunday!

No comments:

Post a Comment

Let's put the social back in social media and continue the conversation on Facebook! Check out the Pen and Hive Page.