The last of the honey harvest is in the barn and ready to be extracted.
It turned out to be a good year for honey production, particularly in the spring and early summer. For a few weeks, it looked as though we were going to have another bad fall harvest. Drought during the last two falls resulted in plants producing little or no nectar, which was bad news for the bees. Normally, the fall honey flow starts in mid-August but this year in Hampden, where most of my hives are located, there was no flow at all in the last weeks of the month. Bees were sending out scouts who returned to their hives frustrated and grumpy.
Then on Sept. 2, it changed and suddenly hives were busy collecting nectar. It was not a huge flow, like we had three years ago, but enough for hives to get busy and fill some honey supers, and more importantly the brood chambers.
It’s a big relief for the beekeeper when we get a fall flow. A nectar flow lowers the physiological stress on the colony which makes them a bit less vulnerable to viruses brought into the hives by mites. A fall flow also reduces the beekeeper’s cost of feeding which becomes increasingly necessary the worse the flow. Last year I had to feed my 70 colonies more than 3,000 lbs of sugar in the form or sugar syrup. This year some smaller colonies still need feeding but I will have bought less than 1,000 lbs of sugar.
One of the changes I made this year was locating more of my hives in outlying areas to reduce the number of hives I had in Hampden and increase the likelihood of finding a honey flow in other areas. Each year I get paid by some farmers to locate hives on their farms to pollinate blueberries, pumpkins, cucumbers and other crops. In some cases where the farm looked to have a good diverse food supply at different times of year I offered to keep two to three times as many hives for the same price if I could keep them there all year long. This makes it more worth my while to attend say eight hives instead of three and makes the traveling less of an overhead per hive.
This summer I have hives in Stockton Springs, Frankfort, Monroe, Hampden, Bangor and Corinth. Another advantage I have found is that I have been able to harvest a bigger variety of honeys from these different locations. Each plant produces a unique nectar which is in turn turned into a unique honey, varying in color, flavor and tendency to crystalize. Varietal honey, like blueberry, clover or raspberry, is where you have bees working a high concentration of one species of plant which dominates the nectar coming in and therefore the honey that they make. Whilst it is not necessarily exclusively from one kind of plant it certainly is predominantly one kind of honey. Where bees are working a very wide range of plants I call this “wildflower honey” because you just cannot distinguish which plants it came from. Different batch of wildflower honey from different areas or different times of the summer can vary enormously. The majority of the 2,500-3,000 pounds of honey I have harvested this year is a mixture of wild flowers. But I have a few hundred pounds of varietal honeys. Those honeys are only available at my farm store on Main Road South in Hampden and will sell out in a month or two. I have enough of my wildflower honey for it to be sold in several stores in the region like Tiller and Rye, Natural Living Center, Central Street Farm House, Highland Organic Blueberry Farm, Mullis Orchard, and Columbia Falls General Store.
I will be giving Adult-Ed beekeeping classes this fall in the following locations:
Ellsworth Beginners Tuesdays Oct. 2, 9 and 16, 6:30 to 8:30 p.m., call 207-664-7110 ellsworth.maineadulted.org
Bangor Beginners Wednesdays Oct. 3,10 and 17, 6:30 to 8:30 p.m., call 207-992-5522 www.bangoradulted.org
Bangor Intermediate Mondays Oct. 22, 29 and Nov. 5, 6:30 to 8:30 p.m., call 207-992-5522 www.bangoradulted.org
Mount Desert Island Beginners Wednesdays Oct. 24, 31 and Nov. 7, 6:30-8:30 p.m., 207-288-4703 https://mdi.coursestorm.com/course/beekeeping-101-f16?search=bee