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January, our busy quietest month!

Well Christmas seems a long time ago now! It’s been a busy month considering its January which is normally a quieter month on the bee farm. We’ve had the builders in and knocked a couple of walls down allowing us access in to a much larger space that is our new warehouse. In total once fully racked we are hoping to be able to fit over 200 pallets in there! The main issue up to now has been the lack of space so it’s feeling a bit strange that we suddenly don’t need to worry about it. 

As part of the warehouse we have built a new honey warmer that will be able to warm about 6 tons of honey at a time, our current honey warmers along with most standard honey warmers have heaters at the top but the issue is the top of the honey drums heat up but the bottom of the drums don’t, this one has ducting in the floor to pump hot air under the pallets and hopefully speed up warming and use less power too. It’s not operational yet but I can’t wait until it is! 

The honey packing side of the business remains busy and I’m proud to say in 2024 we filled a record 247,000 jars! A number I just couldn’t have imagined a couple of years ago! They went out for lot’s of different brands into retailers all around the UK and even abroad to places like Spain, America and Saudi Arabia. 

Out with the bees we’ve been busy treating them for Varroa. Varroa is an invasive mite that lives on honeybees. We trickle a mixture of sugar syrup and Oxalic acid over the bees during the winter. The bees consume the mixture without any issues but it burns the mite which helps keep our bees in peak condition for the spring. When we go around we also add fondant which is sugar to help any hives that look a little short on food. 

In mild weather the bees are more active and so eat more food. Over the next few weeks we will go back around and check if they have eaten their fondant and if we need to top it up again. 

One of the other jobs we’ve done this month is planning this coming season. We’ve decided to stick with hive numbers around 150. That seems to be a good amount for us to produce enough honey for our own sales. We’ve decided to make up some splits (small hives) early in the year, through May and June and then recombine some later in the season to make sure they’re really strong ready for the summer honey flow.  

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Thank you so much for reading our blog, your support as always really helps our small business as we try and build our own honey sales!

Matthew Ingram
Holt Hall Apiary

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