The Beekeeper's Journal - Honey Harvest 2024

On July 9th, we harvested this year’s crop of honey from ECI’s four beehives. This year’s haul was 60 pounds, a substantial increase from last year, which suggests the pollinators are doing ok at least in our small corner of the world.

A successful honey harvest is the culmination of lots of hard work, so a big shout out goes to the ECI beekeepers (Devan Kuettner and Patricia McCabe) as well as this year’s Beehive Sponsors (Gillian Dubin, Pat Sanders and Susan Siegel). Many thanks also to master beekeeper Chris Kelly who supervises the whole operation.

And let’s not forget the worker bees who have to do all the work gathering the pollen. While there’s much variation in the amount of pollen that can be extracted from any given blossom, it takes about 500 worker bees foraging pollen from around 2 million flowers to produce one pound of honey. So considering that we just harvested 60 pounds of honey, our bees have been doing an awful lot of foraging the last few months!

For the beekeepers, the season starts in April when they conduct the first inspection of the hives. This year, two of our hives came through winter in good shape, while the other two were depleted, which meant the first task for the beeks (as the beekeepers like to be called) was to rebalance the hives by moving bees around and adding a few frames to supplement the weaker hives.

Then throughout the spring and early summer the beekeepers perform weekly inspections of the hives to monitor the amount of nectar and pollen that’s been gathered, as well as checking up on the queen bees to make sure they are doing their part by producing eggs consistently and in sufficient quantity. In beekeeper parlance, continuum of brood is the best indication of a healthy hive, which means you can see all stages of the hive’s population growth, from eggs to larvae to capped brood.

The weekly inspections continue until the beekeepers see a healthy accumulation of honey in the frames of each hive. When the honey in the frames appears capped off, this means the moisture content is just right and the honey is ready for harvesting.

This year the ECI beekeeping team was joined by a group of homeschoolers who got to watch and learn about the whole process, and enjoy the sweet taste of another successful honey harvest!

What Grows in the Garden

Tuesday morning is when I usually pick up compost from a few neighbors and haul it over to St Joseph's Villa. Tuesday morning is also when the garden crew turns out in force so, after I unload the compost and turn the pile a few times, I like to help out in the garden for a while.

This was a busy week, amending the soil, transplanting trays of seedlings from the greenhouse, building a trellis for the cucumber beds.  Fortunately we've had a great group of volunteers on hand this spring.  Last week Maribeth says we had ten people show up, and there were around the same number this week, plus a few younger kids. There's no better way to spend an hour or two on a fine spring morning than in the garden with the rest of the crew. Charlie knocking in fence posts with a mallet, Daphne transplanting peas, Maribeth laying out a few rows of carrots, Dave and Ed stringing wire for the trellis.

Each with a separate task but everyone seems invigorated by a shared sense of purpose.  After all, along with the lettuce, peas and carrots  and more than a thousand pounds of other vegetables we'll be growing this year, perhaps the most important product of a community garden is the sense of community itself, which seems to spring from the soil, in greater abundance every year.

Click here if you would like to join the garden crew.