The Two hives of bees we got from Fredrik back at the beginning of April are now beginning to earn their keep. On Sunday we extracted over 25lb of honey from our first complete super – a super is a box that beekeepers place over the brood chamber specifically to collect honey for extraction, the name comes from the Latin; Super meaning ‘above’. We have four others on the hives right now with varying levels of honey stored in them.

The bees we have here are Buckfast types, so called because they come from the lines originally bred at Buckfast Abbey in the UK by Brother Adam Kehrle. Brother Adam was the head beekeeper at Buckfast from 1919 until his retirement in 1992. He founded the Buckfast strain and introduced a method of queen breeding based upon purity of stock, controlled mating, precise records and judicious selection. Br Adam never sought to keep the Buckfast bee for himself, and that’s why small beekeepers like us are able to benefit from his work. A colony is only as good as its queen. The Buckfast strain combines a number of desired characteristics, such as hardiness, low swarming, gentleness, ease of handling, resistance to disease and honey gathering ability, in a single bee.

The honey we extracted this week was collected from mid April through to the end of May by a single hive of bees. There has been no blending or processing of any kind. The honey went from fresh on the combs to sealed jars in just a few hours. We believe the honey to be primarily from sycamore and dandelion as these were the major nectar sources flowing during this period. . Both dandelion and sycamore are excellent nectar sources well worked by honey bees who find copious nectar and plenty of pollen. That is certainly borne out by the amount of honey we managed to extract from just one super. The main advantage of small scale beekeepers is our honey can be exclusively from one hive at a specific time of year. Honey is a complex blend of sugars and trace elements. Many of these organic compounds are volatile and degrade quickly once the honey is extracted. It is these elements that give honey its characteristic floral aromatic taste and are mostly lost in a mass produced product. People are always surprised at the amount of honey one hive of bees can produce, which can be anywhere from nothing to 80lbs in a single season. It has been estimated that bees have to fly around 50,000 miles in order to collect enough nectar to produce one pound of honey – that’s around one and a half times round the world!