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!
