Our team of beekeepers looks after thousands of hives, with each hive housing approximately 50,000 bees. In March we prepare the hives and bees, carefully checking the health of the queen bee and her workers. Our methods are gentle and minimally invasive – stressed bees are less productive foragers and more vulnerable to disease. By taking extraordinary measures to keep our equipment clean and our hives healthy, we eliminate the need for chemicals and antibiotics.
Hand-selected queen bees.
Productive hives depend on high quality queen bees. We select only the gentlest, healthiest queen bees with high-yield hives to graft, ensuring successive generations of industrious bees and abundant honey crops. Grafting is the process of transferring bee larvae from a selected hive into a cell, and placing the cell into a queen-less hive. Worker bees will feed the larvae a diet of royal jelly, which triggers their development into queens.
Our kind of field work.
We place our hives in lush forage with abundant nectar sources to minimize the bees’ workload.Through a dance pattern, bees returning to the hive signal to their fellow bees where to go and how far to travel to collect nectar. Back at the hive, bees convert the nectar to honey, store it in a cell of the comb, and cap it with a light layer of beeswax. Once a hive’s honey frames (supers) are full of capped honey, sometime between July and September, we bring them in from the fields to be extracted.
