Hi Zuzana
no one's answered you I see. Maybe my own experience will give some perspective
on the honey crop thing.
The most common first question people ask me when they hear we have bees is,
"how much honey do you get?" Certainly I expected to get some when we started.
My mother in law gave us a box of 20 or so old jam jars she'd washed for us -
dropping a hint there I think, she loves honey.
I think the most I've got in one year is about 20 jars, which is pathetic by
conventional beekeepers' standards. I've never sold any, and re-used jam jars
are OK for our own purposes and gifts to family. This year we've had to buy
commercial honey as I ate all ours. I doubt many of us have honey to sell.
One year I harvested a box of honey from a Warre which had died (a deadout, as
we call them). When I tasted it - it was almost flavourless. I then realised
what I was eating was essentially the sugar syrup I fed them the previous
Autumn. This was an eye opener to me that
(1) I tended to vastly overfeed my bees;
(2) I suspect a lot of honey made by amateur beekeepers is recycled sugar syrup.
The professional honey farmers know exactly what they're doing though, and
deserve respect. If they say "this is lavender honey" it is.
[Even my best honey is pretty bland. It has a lot of OSR in it due to my rural
location, and whilst it's OK it is not a super great honey.]
By the way, on point (1) above. I was reading conventional beekeepers' advice
that each hive should have 20kg sugar fed to it for winter preparation. I
probably fed them 10-15kg per hive. However it was obvious at the end of winter
that the colonies had only used about 5-6kg before nectar flows restarted in
Spring. That's partly because TBHs and Warres are more insulated than
Nationals, and partly because my bees had tiny winter clusters. (Conventional
beeks worry if they don't have 5 frames of bes all winter. My colonies shrink
to the equivalent of under a frame.) So now my feeling is that it is probably
best to just feed casts caught that year, and let more established colonies
sort themselves out.
This year, I may get a good haul - I'll probably harvest in a few weeks. I have
a couple of large colonies which didn't swarm and the hives are heavy. I might
over 20 jars! (I think this every year. I never do.) We then have to hide most
of them so our relatives don't think we are a free unlimited honey shop!
Many of my colonies, historically, have been casts I caught which died out over
winter. This is probably my first "good" year where I can properly gauge the
potential of natural beekeeping for honey yield. I have basically just left the
colonies alone to do their own thing, and I've been lucky that none died last
winter, and there seems to have been plenty of forage this year; so I have
several strong colonies. This is a key difference to conventional beeks, who
use tricks like replacing queens, merging small colonies and feeding in the
June Gap to ensure the colony has loads of bees all the time, so all their
hives are at max numbers all the time, so when nectar flows do occur the bees
can capitalise on them. The downside of that is, the queens are not accustomed
to reducing laying when appropriate, and they can end up with too many bees
during dearths (like winter) - thus all their monitoring and feeding. There are
a handful of commercial natural beeks, and they reckon they get less honey per
hive but, need much less time to manage each hive and that makes it
commercially viable.
Paul
