Summer

The beginning of summer is when we add our honey boxes (known as supers) to our beehives. The bees are very busy by now, out every day collecting nectar from our pastures and pollinating them while they’re at it. Generally the clover starts flowering from early December through until early January. The duration of this is determined by the heat and rainfall during the period for example, if we receive periods of heat above 24 degrees Celsius the clover flowers stop producing nectar and will shrivel up.

Over summer we continue to monitor our hives for space as their population continues to expand, swarming is still a risk and splitting hives may still be done into the late summer months and sometimes even Autumn.

Every couple of weeks during the summer months and sometimes weekly during the main honey flow (usually late December to late January) we check our hives to see that they have enough space to store their honey. We do this very regularly when producing comb honey as you want to harvest it as soon as it’s capped. Some of our top performing hives will collect up to five supers of honey during a matter of weeks!

To harvest honey at the end of summer we add escape boards to the hive. These are one way exit boards so that the bees remove themselves from the honey boxes, allowing us to harvest the full supers with limited effects on the bees. We make sure to leave a significant amount of honey behind to ensure that our bees are unlikely to require us to feed them sugar syrup throughout the winter period. After all the honey they collect is for them first!