Raw Honey - What is it and can you find it at the big box store?

It's been a steep learning curve since those first 2 packages of Georgia bees arrived in 2012.  One thing I've learned for sure- I have NO aspirations for becoming a commercial beekeeper. I'd rather just try to be good at fulfilling a small local niche.  It's a lot more fun that way when the goal is not necessarily to drive maximum profit from a bee hive. For all you college business majors out there, that must sound really absurd. The truth is that there's just something a lot more personally fulfilling to providing local products that you can't find on Amazon or WalMart or some other big box store. Things that require some aspects of quality and local craftsmanship. I think about the things we can find at the local farmers markets like local produce, fruits and vegetables, homemade jams and jellies, things like that come to mind.

Perhaps that same approach may also apply to beekeeping in some ways when you look at store bought vs local honey and bee products.  For us, keeping bees has been a treatment-free approach since day 1 however it seems the key to making it work is persistence while continuing to find replacement colonies through splits and capturing localized swarms in traps during the late April/May season.  These "rescued" bees as I call them become the foundation for the following year's splits and honey crop. This year we captured 12 new swarms to go with last years winter survivors which themselves got a big jump on the early nectar flows we had this year.

We have as close to an "all natural" approach to keeping bees as possible short of keeping them in hollow logs. It's still important that to harvest honey with minimal stress to the colony that we provide them with standard frames. The Langstroth hive still is the best design, most effective for pulling frames for inspection or harvesting honey.  However, we do not use commercial foundation in the frames rather the bees draw their own comb from the natural nectar found in nature. We do not use miticides (pesticides) or use treatments of any sort in an attempt to deal with varroa. The bees will deal with varroa on their own if we let them.

The honey is truly RAW- It's unheated, untreated, unpasteurized, unfiltered and unadulterated. Honey that comes straight out of the hive and is spun out of frames, coarsely strained, and put into a container. Nothing is added, nothing is taken away.  Currently there are still a few of the 12 and 24 ounce containers of Smith Homestead's All Natural Raw Honey available at Village Hardware in Bethel, Ohio.  Did you know?... Village Hardware was recently named the #1 Hardware store in Ohio by Best Things Ohio https://bestthingsoh.com/hardware-stores/

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Trapping Swarms is like fishing for bees!

Check out this latest video on trapping spring honeybee swarms...

Published on Apr 17, 2017

Swarm captured 4/14/17, a good sized swarm. Had the unique opportunity to catch them on video as they were moving into the trap. Didn't notice right away but watch the girls line up in a semi-circle, fanning queen pheromone from the entrance so the rest of the colony can locate it. 

Trapping Updates:
2nd swarm captured on 4/16/17
3rd- 4/24
4th- 4/25
5th- 5/8
6th- 5/12
7th- 5/13
8th- 5/14
9th- 5/16

See the scout bees visit this trap a few days prior to this capture... https://youtu.be/x0T-sKITJUs

Spring is upon us!

Well another winter is hopefully behind us as we begin to feel the warmth and sunshine and experience longer days... we'll be planting again soon. It also causes us to look forward to harvesting some more of that delicious Raw Ohio Honey! It will be a goal to maintain 20-25 honeybee colonies going into Fall. To get there we'll need to do some splits. We'll also build some additional swarm traps and get them placed before April 1st. Last year we put out 10 traps and captured 10 swarms!

It's been a very mild winter once again as it was in 2016, except even warmer. This year we really didn't experience any extremely cold weather or substantial snowfall. This warm winter/early spring also causes some of the early sources of pollen and nectar to be available earlier to the bees. The silver maple is the earliest available source of natural food for the bees followed closely by the red maple bloom.

There is a very useful tool that I have found called the Ohio Phenology Calendar put together by The Ohio State University. Essentially, researchers have figured out that all perennials first bloom is based on accumulated growing degree days. Here is the formula.... High Temp for the day plus low temp.  Divide by 2.  Subtract 50.  A positive number above 50 therefore is recorded as a growing degree day (GDD). Accumulate 34 GDDs and your silver maples will bloom. My personal observations are that this has been spot on for the past 2 years since I've been following this method. Today in my zipcode of 45106 we are currently at 144 GDDs which means that as of yesterday our bradford pears should have begun their first bloom.

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