June and the year is flying!
Well what a difference a month makes. Back at the start of
May I was busy moaning about an awful spring, wettest on record and so cold.
Saying how the bees had produced no spring crop and wondering what the plan
was.
Fast forward to now and the honey crop is looking amazing,
the bees are firing on all cylinders and we’ve gone from worrying they have too
little food to worrying we can’t keep up with giving them enough space to store
it all.
We’ve been really busy producing the first queens of the year. The process involves moving day old larvae from the selected breeding colony, one that we think has great qualities like calmness, disease resistance and of course, good honey production. The larvae is then placed in a colony with no queen and through natural instincts they produce queens cells which later hatch as queens.
Through this process we can produce up to about 30 queens a week which is more than enough for us to make the increase in hives that we want.
Currently while I’m sat writing this I’m just outside York having finished my first day training for a scheme called DASH – Disease Assurance Scheme for Honeybees run by The National Bee Unit part of DEFRA. This should mean I am able to manage notifiable diseases that impact honey bees in the UK as well as manage the treatment of the hive if they are found. It’s a course that I think will be really helpful to ensure our bees are as healthy and well looked after as possible while also reducing the amount of checks we have from the National
Bee Unit each year.
Thank you for reading our blog again this month, it’s a little shorter as i’ve been so busy but hope to do a longer one in the next few months!
We will be at The Open Air Country Fair on the 3rd and 4th June so please do come along and support lots of great local businesses.
Thank you
Matthew Ingram
Holt Hall Apiary
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