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Summer Hive at my farm. Photo Credit: Collette Greystone.
When I retired, I bought a ten acre piece of land that we turned into a small heirloom fruit and herb farm. For twelve years we took our produce to farmers markets. The pandemic caused us to quit going to market, thus quit farming for market. We grow our own food and that’s it now.
At the height of our operation, we had five beehives that produced thirty to forty pounds of honey per hive. (We started with one.) We harvested in Spring and mid Summer. We sold the honey in half pound and one pound jars at the farmer’s market. If you’ve ever purchased honey at a Farmer’s market you know what they cost.
The math wasn’t hard to do, but multiple hive bee keeping is.
That’s why a bee keeping farmer charges what he does.
Here’s what I wrote at our farm website regarding our foray (venture or an initial attempt, especially outside one's usual area) into beekeeping, beyond are the lessons I learned keeping bees:
FARM HIVES
Many years ago, at the same time we were introducing the raspberries to the field we took a bee keeping class at Ohio State University. We thought keeping bees with the raspberries were a natural combination.
When that class concluded, we decided that bee keeping was far too much to take on at the same time we were learning to produce raspberries well. Since we don't do it unless we're going to do it well, we dropped that idea.
But that idea didn't really go away. In the years since that decision, we've introduced flower gardens with the intention of eventually keeping bees.
This is the year for that. (2015)
Flowhive at work. Photo Credit: Collette Greystone.
There's been a lot of talk about the Flow Hive™, we've heard pros and cons and we landed in the camp that says Flow Hive™ is the way we wanted to get into bee keeping.
The Flow Hive™ is a truly amazing invention. It eliminates a lot of the interfering with the bees traditional honey extraction requires. The Flow Hives™ don't change how you keep care of your bees.
In order to keep your bees healthy, there are tasks that must be completed if you have Flow Hives™ - or not. It does allow the keeper to pour the honey directly from the hive to the jars that the end honey product will be sold in. This benefit also gives us the ability to say we are offering pure, raw, unprocessed honey and really mean it.
This differs greatly from the processing traditional beekeepers must do which involves physical disruption of the colony, death to bees, lots of stainless steel and movement of the honey from the hive to processing equipment before it ever sees a jar.
The Flow Hives™ contain plastic honey comb frames that are split using a “key” that allows the honey to flow down to the bottom of the frames which is angled towards tubes you can “tap” and pour right into jars. Once the honey has drained you use the key to return the plastic honey comb to the original position. No frames are removed, no bees are killed. All based on gravity and the bees don’t have to spend time rebuilding honeycomb that would have potentially been destroyed using traditional extraction methods.
In fact we weren't sure the bees would like the Flow Hives™ and at first went with a hybrid setup mixing traditional frames and Flow Hive™ frames in the Supers. The bees didn't care. We harvested the honey from the Flow Hives™ and let the bees have the honey from traditional frames for themselves.
Our honey is 100% pure, raw honey; never pasteurized or high-pressure filtered. Unprocessed, unfiltered raw honey retains all the health benefits like the live enzymes, trace vitamins, minerals, anti-oxidants, antibacterial properties, but most importantly, preserves the natural taste and aroma of the honey.
Left: Winterized hive, Center: 2021 harvest, Right: Hives when they were in the raspberry field. Photo Credit: Collette Greystone.
HONEY PRODUCTION
Our Flow Hives™ reside in the general proximity of the raspberry field. This doesn't mean our honey will taste like raspberries! It means our bees will enjoy all the flowers our raspberry plants produce in the Spring. Our raspberry field also has chamomile, dandelions, violets, blackberry flowers, strawberries and melons! Plenty for them to do! We've also installed over the years, flowering perennials for cutting, but now for the bees too!
And if the raspberry field wasn't enough, our farm is also home to many indigenous (native) flowering herbs, fruit trees and wild flowers. The surrounding forested acres are filled with Tulip poplars, Locust, American Red buds, Elderberry, Spicebush - all put on a pretty spectacular floral display in the Spring!
Moving into Summer, the blackberries and melons begin to blossom as well as Summer flowers like Monarda, Hyssop, Yarrow and other Summer flowering herbs.
Autumn brings wild Asters, Goldenrod and Joe Pye Weed.
A honey bee will fly up to 2 miles searching for flowers. Since one has no control over pesticides and herbicides that may be used in a 2 mile radius, especially in a farming community, the prudent beekeeper attempts to keep his bees busy and local!
We harvest honey in the Spring and in mid Summer, if production is good. We avoid harvesting after August to allow the hives to build up a store for winter. Bees in a hive need roughly three to four frames of honey for survival in the Winter.
Raw honey is not processed, heated or filtered in any way. Raw honey is as unique as its floral source. This is why the color may vary from one harvest to the next. Our honey is poured directly from the hive to the jars you receive it in. Other honey vendors rely on disruption of the hive and several steps of stainless steel processing.
HONEY IS A SUPERFOOD
Honey is made up of 38.2% of fructose, 31% glucose and only 1.3 % sucrose. Raw unprocessed honey contains many substances important to human nutrition. It has all of the B-complex, A, C, D, E, and K, minerals and trace elements: magnesium, sulfur, phosphorus, iron, calcium, chlorine, potassium, iodine, sodium, copper, and manganese. The live enzyme content of honey is one of the highest of all foods.
Raw unprocessed honey has anti-viral, anti-bacterial, and anti-fungal properties. It promotes body and digestive health, it is a powerful antioxidant, it strengthens the immune system, and is an excellent remedy for skin wounds and all types of infections.
Local honey also has the added benefit of reducing symptoms of allergies. Consuming traces of pollen in the honey may decrease the impact of some airborne pollen.
Me checking on the “girls”. Photo Credit: Husband.
FAQ
Does honey spoil?
Honey does not spoil – ever. It does not need refrigeration either. Just take care not to drop food particles into the honey. Raw honey does crystallize.
When honey gets crystallized, does that mean its “bad”?
NO. Honey does not go bad. Most honey will crystallize over time, meaning you can’t see through it anymore, and it becomes less liquid and more solid. This is a natural process for honey, and will happen sooner in some than in others. It means the honey you bought is raw and of the finest quality. Processed honey takes forever to crystallize.
Why does honey crystallize?
The crystallization of honey is actually an attribute of natural raw honey. Why? Honey is a highly concentrated sugar solution. It contains more than 70% sugars and less than 20% water. This means that the water in honey contains more sugar than it would naturally hold. The overabundance of sugar makes honey unstable so it is natural for honey to crystallize since it is an over-saturated sugar solution.
How should I store my honey?
Store your honey at room temperature. Even after opening, you do not need to refrigerate the honey.
Raw Honey vs. the Store Bought Honey Bear: What’s the difference?
Mass produced and supermarket honey is a blend of honeys from many places and floral origins. There’s no way for you to know exactly where it came from. What we do know is that it is processed, heated, filtered, and treated so that it has that uniform color and translucence that we have mistakenly come to know as “honey.” Real honey is raw honey. It comes in many colors, textures and thicknesses.
The (zoomed) view of the beehives from my front porch, across the pond. Photo Credit: Collette Greystone.
What I Learned
I learned that your local guy is the best place to buy your first gaggle of girls. Master bee keepers will grow and sell queens in a “nuke”. A nuke is a starter box that contains a frame with the queen and other bees plus some frames of honey that you install in your hive. Set your hive up and be ready to insert the frames immediately. Don’t park at Lowes on your way back home with your nuke, go directly to your ready-and-waiting-hive.
As the years went by, I learned how to split a hive, which means to take some frames of bees from the original hive and establish them in a new hive. It’s how we got to five.
I learned to relocate hives. I can now see them from my front porch. Make it easy on yourself. Hiking to the raspberry field added to the hard work.
I learned that hive boxes can be very heavy, surprisingly heavy. It’s how you throw out your back.
If I had it to do over I’d use a Layens hive. A Layens hive is a horizontal hive that is one rectangular box housing somewhere between 12-30 extra-deep frames. You don’t have to lift hive boxes at all.
We were a biodynamic farm. This means we worked with the concept that a farm is a site-specific ecosystem. Biodynamic farming is a holistic system that places importance on all of a farm's elements: soil, water, plants & animals. These methods rely heavily on soil building, water conservation, composting, animal production and animal by-products. With the bees, anything we did, we had to think if it would hurt the bees. I called them my “girls”.
I learned that if you don’t winterize the hive sufficiently, bees will freeze in snow and ice.
I learned that creepy crawly bugs will invade your hives, so will mice. Ants are vicious. Hive beetles also will creep you out (look like miniature roaches) and invade. Mice eat the honeycomb. There are natural cures which I also learned about.
I felt lucky, the Master beekeeper I got my original girls from, battled bears.
Swarming is spectacular. Swarming is when the bees decide the hive is too crowded, or that a subgroup wants a new queen. With swarming, you see half of your bees fly out of the hive, in a tornado type fashion and land on a tree branch higher than you can reach. It’s how hives split themselves in nature. It’s a hard lesson. You have to stay ahead of them and split the hives, or add more boxes before they decide to swarm, usually in early Spring.
I learned if a curious cat follows you to “help” with your beekeeping tasks, the bees can and will chase and sting him multiple times. We observed him for a while and brought him into the air conditioning, Benadryl was waiting. Don’t leave the hive open if this happens.
I learned, when bees sting, they die, but they leave a pheromone on you that tells the other bees, many of them, to chase you relentlessly and sting you, multiple times. They can fly quickly and they can turn into a huge group in no time. Diving into the pond works well.
I learned driving a bright orange Kubota tractor attracts many bees.
I learned that Dadant and Sons are your best source for beekeeping supplies. There are gadgets for everything you might do with bees and it can get quite expensive if you let it. DIY is effective for most gizmos.
I learned that in the Spring when everything is blossoming in the raspberry field, on the front porch, almost a quarter mile away, you can hear intense buzzing; and if you’re in the raspberry field, you can’t have a conversation without shouting.
I learned that your own honey is the best you’re ever going to taste, because you know the work that went into producing it. That’s what makes it taste better.
As we sit here in the snowy months flipping through seed catalogs, let me throw the idea of bee keeping out there to you.
One hive is easy and fun.
Five is hard and a lot of work.
But one is fun.
A Layens hive.
Don’t get seed catalogs? They’re fun to flip through (the paper ones), and the online ones are pretty nice too.
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So you would recommend the flow hives? Is there a lot of maintenance?
You are very ambitious! My aunt and and sister-in-law both had honey bees. I didn't realize that honey contained so many nutrients.