Harvest
- Honeybees on poppies at the Denver Botanic Gardens
The Bunces took a much needed vacation this past week, but the bees didn’t. Before we left, we pulled and extracted the first “pull” of honey for the season. One of our favorite little joys in beekeeping is the anticipation of the honey harvest and wondering what flavors will show up each year. Every flower has a contribution to the final flavor. Clover makes a light honey with little to talk about other than clear sweetness, and so it is desired as a sweetener. But goldenrod in the fall makes a deep orange honey, highly favored by some for its special flavor. Heath and heather and rosemary make a thicker honey, sometimes white and crystallized early requiring the wax to be crushed to extract the honey.
- Swarms caught this year, growing up in a new yard
Our honey is never a single floral source but a melange of our garden, the neighbors flowers, the trees flowering in the woods nearby, and all the clover flowers popping up in the neighbors yards. The bees range sometimes up to three miles looking for their favorite and most abundant nectar sources. The weather all spring long impacts the flowers that the bees reach as well. If it rains for the majority of the persimmon, or pear tree bloom, the bees won’t fly on those days and it won’t show up in the honey as much.
So far, it looks like borage and clover contributed a lightness to the honey harvested from the hives at our home, and fruit trees and poplars ( and untold others ) have given the hives at our friends’ farm a darker color as usual, but the season isn’t over.
Before we left for vacation, my son and I took the frames that we emptied back to the bees at home and on the farm. The bees will keep making honey while the weather keeps up this wonderful cycle of rain to make the flowers full of nectar and fair days for flying.
Take care,
-Cameron