What's new on the farm:
The bees aren't bringing any more honey home.
Sadly for us, it hasn't rained in over 5 weeks. The lack of rain led to a shorter blossoming period for the wildflowers and crops.
A couple weeks of crazy hot weather didn't help things either.
That means, there is no more nectar for the bees to bring in.
You can tell when there is or isn't nectar for the bees to collect just looking at their behavior in the bee yards.
If the bees are busy flying out and about, they have found something to forage on.
But if there are many of them hanging out around our beekeeping equipment and anywhere that we have honey (tools, etc.), they are "robbing" the honey to bring back to their hive because they can't find any nectar.
Robbing is always expected, but we always hope to see it at the very end of summer, not the first half of August.
Unfortunately, this means that our honey crop for 2024 is a lot smaller than we had hoped for.
We are disappointed, but on the other hand, the farming lifestyle is always unpredictable and subject to the whims of external factors out of our control like the weather, global markets, etc.
So the most we can do is focus on things we can control, like making sure that our bees are strong and healthy.
With the end of honey season, we have shifted our mindset to winter preparations.
You have to start early to make sure that the bees are disease-free and healthy going into the winter.
We will also be working on creaming and packaging our fresh 2024 crop.
Even though it's a smaller volume than we hoped, we couldn't be more happier with the quality of the honey.
We are pretty nerdy about honey, and we are excited to see the colors and excellent moisture levels that have been naturally harvested.
The honey that we harvested this year is graded as "water-white," which is the lightest grading and yields the highest prices on the bulk commodity market.
You may be dismayed to learn that most mass-market packers will buy some water-white honey, and also buy darker honey (which is cheaper), and then blend it together to lighten the dark honey and get a cheaper and more uniform product.
That really takes away from the unique profile of each variety of honey, which is a shame. Fortunately, you don't ever have to worry about that when you're eating honey from us!
