Lots of people are asking – when will there be honey for sale?

Checking frames are capped and ready for harvesting

It’s been a funny year. Our colonies are generally strong, and there’s been a reasonably good nectar flow, but the challenge has been the weather. When the bees store nectar in the hive, it has to “ripen” into honey. Primarily this involves the reduction in water content, but with a very wet June the humidity has meant the ripening process has taken a long time. Often, just as honey was nearly ready, we’d have a few rainy days and the bees would have no option but to consume the honey they’d put away for, well, a rainy day.

With the recent hot spell, however, stores are building up and in the past couple of days we’ve taken off and extracted the first full “supers” of honey. There are plenty more to come but with finite resources (including time and energy!) we can only take off one super at a time and will wait until most are extracted before we begin the bottling process.

Uncapping a frame prior to extraction

One frame loaded into the extractor. A further 3 frames will be added before the honey is spun out

So there’s good news and bad – good that at last the harvest is about ready, but there will still be two or three weeks before we can once again put up the “Honey for Sale” sign again.

Be assured that as soon as we have honey to sell, we’ll also be posting here and on twitter, so watch this space!