Welcome Fall!

The season is over for honey production and now we change gears to winter preparation. We checked all of our hives today to make sure that they are on par for winter stores. Bees need plenty of honey to eat all winter long, so we can't take anymore for bottling until next spring. Some of the hives are a bit low, but they have a while until it gets too cold for nectar collection. We are excited for the few months we will have off, but also very excited to get back in the game next spring! We look forward to seeing how the bees overwinter and to getting started splitting hives in the spring and gearing up for honey production.

Almost done!

We extracted honey this week, it was the lightest honey we have ever had! The flavor is very light and sweet, a change from the dark, strong honey we had been extracting pretty much all season. We only have one farmers market left, and hopefully we will have a successful last week!
We have restarted one hive that we lost earlier in the season, and requeened another hive that had their queen. All in all, we have had a very successful few weeks, and we are looking forward to finishing strong!

5 Weeks!

We are five weeks into market now. Five down, five to go!

Beekeeping update: Current weather and flower availability has caused the spring honey flow(times when nectar is plentiful enough for bees to produce large amounts of honey) to end. Fall honey flow will begin some time in middle august, so we can be expected to get back to work collecting honey then. To keep the bees strong, busy, and healthy, we are feeding them will sugar syrup(one pound sugar to pound of water) out of buckets. Each hive eats about ten pounds of sugar every three or four days. We will have plenty to do keeping the buckets filled.

Today at Bethany Beach was really great. We debuted our homemade honey vanilla ice cream, which was a big hit. It was so good and it was made with cream, milk, honey and vanilla. That was it! We made it last night so it would have time to freeze, and it turned out great. The recipe is here, and it was super easy to make with our honey, so pick up a bottle and make a batch in your home ice cream maker! We had beautiful flowers as well, but they sold out early, so if you want them next week, come early!

Happy 4th!

We went to the Fenwick Island market yesterday. We had all of our regular merchandise, with special lollipops to celebrate the 4th, they were little flags! We have also added fresh cut flowers and adorable skep candles to our list of goods to be sold. We are so excited to see how Bethany goes tomorrow, come out and see us!

Checking the polination hives

Today we drove out to check some of the pollination hives. It was late in the afternoon, close to evening, which didn't make for happy bees (we got stung a few times each, but nothing a little walking off couldn't take care of). After checking to see how they were doing (they all had at least some honey in the supers, with a few being almost full), we added extra supers and queen excluders to some of the strongest hives and went on our way. Soon, we should be able to harvest the honey and bottle it up for the farmers markets!

The first two farmers markets

This past week saw our first two farmers markets, Fenwick Island and Bethany Beach. We did pretty well, selling over fifty pounds of honey and a good amount of our honey candy. We totally sold out of our creamed honey, but there will be more this coming week. The honey lollipops and old fashioned hard candy were the best candy sellers, the lollipops being most popular with the kids. For the first week, our sales were pretty strong, and we are only expecting good things for Fourth of July weekend! See you at the beach!