Heatherside Honey – Our bees and honey
At Heatherside Honey the bees come first. Our primary operation is to maintain a healthy honeybee population. The production of honey and beeswax is secondary to the welfare of our hives (but is a welcome bonus). We work on the principal that if our bees are doing well then the quality and quantity of the honey is improved. We have over 10 years experience of keeping bees and have a thriving number of honeybee colonies. Our bees were originally of buckfast heritage but over the years have become “Surrey mixed”, breeding with local bee populations. I only produce my own queens and do not buy or import stock from outside the local area. My colonies produce the next generation of queens which in turn produce the worker bees for that year, which in turn produce the next crop of honey.
Heatherside Honey Bees
Our bees are the western “honey bee” (Apis mellifera). These are not the common “bumble bee” that you may be more familiar with. The bees are given a place to live, (the hive) where they are warm and more importantly able to keep dry. The bee colony has a set life cycle each year which includes swarming, gathering pollen and nectar, and producing and storing food (honey). Usually we can get a small crop of honey in the spring and then a larger summer crop, which is usually harvested in early autumn. The bees then spend the winter keeping warm and biding their time until the weather is warm enough to get out of the hive again.
Honey
Honey bees gather nectar to turn into honey whenever it is available. It is a peculiar trait of the honeybee that they will gather more food than the colony needs to sustain itself. This means we can take a proportion of the honey produced leaving enough for the colony to prosper. At Heatherside Honey we prefer to leave a good supply of honey for the bees, and only artificially feed sugar in times of crisis, (usually very dry weather when flowers are delayed blooming) to prevent the colony from starving.
