E&T Honey
I know that chickens don't make honey but apparently they do make good bee-buddies by eating bugs that attack the hives.
We ordered 2 hives in March 2021 so we'll hopefully have honey in August from now on.
We'll keep you updated here.
2021
Our first year beekeeping...
So, after years of talking about getting bees and then a few months of looking into it, we got 2 colonies of bees.
Both are "Buckfast" strain of honey bee that we got from Black Mountain Honey in North Wales.
We've had a steep learing-curve!
Unfortunately these particular queens were very swarm-y. We lost at least 3 queens from these 2 hives in the first couple of months, taking over half the colony with her each time! We were starting to wonder what was going on!
We split one of the hives to make a total of 3 in an attempt to pre-empt the swarming (Spoiler: It didn't work).
Luckily we had a mentor. An experienced keeper who happens to live nearby and was always on hand to show us what we were doing wrong. The first thing we were doing wrong was not spending enough money, apparently. - Additional to our initial outlay, it appeared that we had to spend the same amount again on additional hives, kit, extensions for the original hives and then stuff to extract the honey at the end of the season.
The other thing we weren't doing right was actually having any hands-on experience so we had a lot of learning to do. as we went along. Learning what a healthy brood look like; how (and when) to look for the queen; how to handle her and what to do if she started just laying boy bees.
We made plenty of other mistakes too but this entry would be too long to go into those here.
Suffice to say that we've finished the season with 3 hives (The Britons with a queen we've called "Beedicca"; The Ancient Egyptians with a queen we've called "Nefertiti 2" and Pop World with a queen called "Queen Poppy"). We harvested 50 jars of honey (all from The Britons) and have left enough for the colonies to use up over winter.
The final mistake I made (so far) was post extraction, I put one of supers, empty but still covered in honey onto the weakest hive (Pop World) so that they would have a little extra but I must have not put the lid on properly and they got robbed, It was a disaster. There were dead bees everywhere!
We fixed it and the colony is surviving. Another lesson learned.
