I began keeping bees about 5 years ago. I noticed my orchard did not produce as much fruit as I would have expected, so I decided I needed honey bees! I began by reading a couple books and going to a honey bee presentation. The next thing I knew I had a barn stacked with bee hives to house the bees that would arrive in the early spring. When I picked up my bees, I followed all the steps I had read about to set up a hive, and then I stood back and let the bees do their thing. I noticed within days the number of bees on the apple blossoms had increased, and within a few weeks there were more baby apples developing on the tress then ever before! I was thrilled with the idea of more apples and pears in the Blue Ash Farm orchard!
As the summer continued there was routine maintenance and hive checks necessary to keep my bees healthy and happy in their home at Blue Ash Farm. As a novice that first year, I did not expect any honey and originally wanted the bees for pollination anyway. I just thought if I get a little bit of honey on the side that is just a bonus!
Normally newer hives produce very little honey for human harvesting. They spend so much time and energy the first year building out the honey comb and raising more worker bees to keep the hive running. If there is a surplus of honey, then it is there for the taking. Well, I obviously did something right that first year or maybe the habitat at Blue Ash Farm is perfect for honey bees as I expected it would be, but out of my first two hives, my very first season of bee keeping, I collected almost 600 pounds of honey! That doesn’t include the honey I had to leave in the hives for the bee colony to survive the oncoming winter.
I knew I had a great treat to share with family and friends. I bought jars, made labels and started giving honey to anybody that wanted it. I even gave my neighbor 15 pounds so he could make Mead Wine, that is a story for my blog another time. Not only was everyone thrilled to get a jar but I was being told it was the best honey they had ever tasted! I offered to refill their honey jars whenever they needed more. I started using honey in a lot of my cooking and developed new recipes that included honey. It brought so much depth and flavor to so many recipes, from appetizers, main courses to deserts and everything in between.
As I expanded my apiary, the cost or new bees and expense of equipment made me realize I needed to sell the honey in order to make it worth my while to maintain the honey production. Keeping bees is somewhat hands-off but they are still considered livestock and need my regular attention. It is a labor of love, I have been stung countless times and a lot of the work takes place in the heat of the summer while I’m dressed in a hot bee suit and the end of summer harvest is sticky and messy and requires a lot of time.
I have become a honey connoisseur and believe the honey produced on Blue Ash Farm is second to none. Each year the amount of honey harvested is different and I sell it in limited quantities. There is never enough to go around and when the last jar is sold that is it until next year!
