Another important piece of Rocky Top Farm was put into place Spring of 2019. After installing many additional fruit and nut trees, blueberry, raspberry, and strawberry plants, herbs, etc. it was time to bring them in.
As of March 11th we still have 1 hive going strong! And from that 1 hive we have had 3 swarms (caught 2) and made 4 splits. We were able to give our 2 swarms to a family to get them started in their own beekeeping journey and have 5 hives as of May 20th, World Bee Day!!!
We were awarded 3 of 10 Frame Langstroth hive kits through the Virginia Beehive Distribution program in the fall of 2018. They had to be assembled and a site made ready for our packaged honey bees which were picked up late March of 2019.
Our 3 hives blossomed into 5 before the end of 2019 and we stocked them up with lots of sugar water and "Winter Bee Kind" boards to help them get through the winter. We did have to combine 2 into 1 and believe we lost another (no dead bees though) in January. On warm days I will see the girls down at the barn gathering pollen supplement I put out and dust from the chickens cracked corn. I did harvest a little honey from the one hive that seemingly disappeared but hope to have honey to sell Spring of 2020. Be sure to visit the Contact Us page and send us an inquiry or get on our email list if you are looking for local honey! We use it in many ways but love it in our homemade Elderberry syrup.
Looking forward to catching some feral honey bees this year and maybe doing some splits to build up our numbers in 2020. Stay tuned for updates!
No feral bees yet, but have had success with catching our own swarms and splitting!