Bees Will Always Make More Bees, They Will Sometimes Make Honey

Here is a summary of the Honey Hives for 2024 and the start of 2025. After a successful year of splitting and catching swarms that at one time had the apiary up to 11 hives, the hives only produced about 20lbs of honey. The first disappointment of the honey year was when the black locust trees didn't bloom which meant no early spring honey. The goldenrod were a better late summer crop this year, but since many people don't appreciate this honey's strong taste, we didn't bottle this for sale in the Matthaei Botanical Gardens gift shop.

We went into winter with 8 hives, but I'm afraid we are now down to 4 after some late February or early March losses. Just today I added winter patties that have sugar as well as a little pollen substitute to the living hives, and saw that they all had plenty of sugar after being low on sugar earlier this winter which required several feedings of dry granulated sugar.

Stay tuned for future updates as we will be adding a third Flow Hive honey super to the apiary this year! This purchase was made with a gift card the club received from Flow Hive as a reward for club members purchasing Flow Hives with the A2B2 club discount code.

As always, if you have questions about the Flow Hive or would like to join the honey hive maintenance team and get some experience with a Flow Hive or just some hands-on beekeeping experience in general, contact Jen at [email protected].