THE 2023 SEASON WAS ANOTHER GOOD ONE…
…and we thought you might enjoy a quick report on how your favorite honeybees did this year.
In a word, the Springboro Tree Farms honeybees did GREAT!
We wrapped up the season with a harvest of 130 gallons of honey. That’s more than double our 2022 harvest and by far, our best season yet. More importantly however, we are leaving the hives with a LOT of honey to work with as the pollen and nectar season winds down and they prepare for another Indiana winter. A big part of a successful apiary is to not get greedy with your honey harvest.
Coupled with good harvest discipline, there’s a fair amount of work behind this size harvest…by both the bees and the people who help with the apiary. A special thank you to Joe, Jim, Sam and Brian who helped tend the bees this year and work thru the harvest.
By the numbers, we started into last winter with 25 hives and lost 6. (76% survival) From the remaining 19 fairly healthy hives we then enjoyed a successful OTS effort in the spring and expanded the hive count to 32 hives at the peak of the season. A healthy hive will easily hold 50,000 bees so while we never got around to counting them, our best guess is that STF is home to 1,600,000 bees. In terms of the 2023 harvest, we pulled 52 honey supers this year (averaging 9 frames per super). This resulted in 130 gallons of honey…and at 12 pounds per gallon that’s north of 1,500 pounds of honey!
Another interesting bit of information is that of the 30 +/- hives we cared for this year our honey harvest came primarily from 18 hives. This is very typical for an apiary our size and it means that we averaged 83 pounds of honey per harvested hive. The professionals tell us that they like to target 100 pounds per harvested hive so we’re pleased with our 83 pound bees!!!
Next up we’ll watch the late summer weather and take care to feed our bees as the summer drought takes its toll. Then in a couple of months we’ll be putting them to bed for the winter as we all look forward to another successful honeybee season in 2024.
Thank you for following along and if you have any questions, please let us know. We love our honeybees…and we love sharing this passion with you.
And as always, we are very thankful for the support of some very knowledgeable folks including:
- Our friends at Bastin Honey Bee Farm for solid advice. Find more at (https://bastinhoneybeefarm.com/
- Chuck Daily, Patty Jones and all the members of the West Central Indiana Bee Club. westcentralindianabeekeepers@gmail.com.
- Find your local club here: https://indianabeekeeper.com/local_clubs
- And of course for Melvin Disselkoen, author of the book OTS Queen Rearing that continues to teach us so much about growing our apiary. Find out more at https://www.mdasplitter.com/