The winter of 2014 was one of the coldest and longest winters on record resulting in more loss. In February, we lost two colonies and lost a third in March. The bees were too cold to get to their honey and probably starved to death. They were all found huddled and frozen in an area of the hives where the worker bees had been trying their best to keep the queen warm and alive. Despite this sad setback, we decided to stay on our original plan of expanding our operation in the spring. In addition to the surviving hive, we added 9 new production hives and three backup nukes — small hive boxes to house colonies that have enough room to sustain themselves, but are not producing extra honey. The bees in two out of the nine new colonies did not perform normally and even with our management attempts to support their success, they died out.
The spring and summer of 2015 continued the trend of unique weather conditions. With excess rain in May, June, and July the pollen and nectar flow started a month late. Once the pollen and nectar flow started, our bees were extremely busy prompting us to add extra honey ‘supers’ to both Hive one and some of the new hives. Further complicating things, the unusually high moisture content in the hives did not allow the bees to dry their honey and cap it off until September. Though we were originally planning to harvest honey from only Hive one this year, we were happily surprised to find two more hives had enough extra honey to let us harvest some. We harvested 115 pounds of honey in September and an additional 27 pounds in October — a full month later than normal!
Along with our dedicated beekeeper Don and the rest of the Fairholme Farm team we have learned a lot over these four years and feel that our patience and perseverance has paid off.
