What's new on the farm:
It's mid-July in the prairies and the flow is ON!
That means that we're at the time of the year when tons of crops and wildflowers are flowering and releasing nectar.
This coincides with our hives growing close to their peak populations, meaning there are lots of worker bees foraging the fields to bring that nectar back to the hive.
The "flow" of nectar coming from the flowers is so strong, the air itself smells sweet.
My father-in-law always said that beekeeping is like working in a bouquet of flowers.
He's totally right - imagine seeing fields of flowers and inhaling the sweet nectar wafting in the air. Combine that with the fresh clean scent of a beehive when you open one up and you have some pretty great work conditions.
Leading up to this week, Andrew and the crew have been visiting the beehives and adding empty honey boxes on top of each of them so the bees have somewhere to put their excess honey.
As bees start to collect nectar and turn it into honey, they first put into the combs in their brood nest, which is the area of the hive where the queen lays eggs, and baby bees develop into worker bees.
But since there is so much nectar coming in, the workers can't help but keep foraging and turning it into honey. If left unchecked they will keep adding more and more honey until the hive gets too full and the queen will run out of places to lay eggs or for the other workers to store pollen.
So to avoid having the brood nest get "plugged up" with honey, we add the honey boxes for the bees to store the extra honey in before it gets to the point where they have run out of room.
If the nectar flow keeps going, the bees will keep bringing in nectar, so we continually check the hives to add more boxes if needed.
Sometimes we have had hives get up to 10 boxes tall! Each box can store about 60-70 lbs of honey. This is way more honey than the bees could ever consume in a season, so that's why beekeepers are able to harvest the excess honey for humans to eat.
Saskatchewan is actually known to have some of the highest honey yields per hive in the whole world and some hives will produce over 300 lbs of excess honey!
Next time I'll dive into how bees actually cure and preserve their honey. It's actually incredible how they are able to make something so clean and preserved that we can eat it straight from the hive without any refining or processing!
