We’re sad to announce that this year’s Honey Fest on September 6th is cancelled.
Farmer Gavin and I went into the hives last week to get a sense of how much honey our little worker bees had stored and were shocked to find VERY little!
We’re new beekeepers, so we’ve been asking other more knowledgeable beekeepers in the neighbourhood why they think this might have happened, and we’ll keep investigating. We may not have had enough foragers in our hive during the nectar flow, maybe they decided to eat what they had stored, or some other reason we have yet to uncover. The intricacies of relationships and cycles within a hive are complex, and we’re learning all the time.
This is a good reminder that sometimes this is the way things work in the world of agriculture. We can’t control everything, sometimes crop fail, and sometimes it is best to listen to what the land has to say. On the bright side, our hives are doing well and our queens have been much happier and stronger this season – we’ve been making bees instead of honey! We’ll bolster their stores by feeding them a little in the coming weeks, and leave the honey that they have stored for them to eat over the winter. Keep your fingers crossed for a good honey season next year!