How long does it take to harvest honey?

“One day. [We] let them build all summer, build honey. [Then we,]take a day to go out there and take all the honey off of them.”

How many times a year do you harvest?

“Once or twice.”

How much honey do you usually get from a harvest?

“It depends, you can get up to 100 pounds per hive. It’s usually anywhere from 40 to 100 pounds.”

How many hives do you have?

“Eight.”

How many bees do you have in total?

“Well, it branches from about 20 thousand to 40 thousand bees in a hive, so multiply that by 8.”

How many bees do you have with you?

“There’s probably two thousand in here.”

How did you guys prepare for today?

“We had to sit them in the house, brought it here and just brought the tools.

That’s all we had to do.”

What’s the hardest part of having bees or maintaining them?

“Staying on top of them and getting out there when you need to.”

How do you replace bees when they die?

“You can either buy them or split the hive. In spring, they’ll build up, and right before they swarm you can split them.”

How many queens do you need per hive?

“One queen per hive.”

Have you ever had anything weird happen with your bees or had an especially fun or hard experience?

“No, not really. Not very many obstacles. This spring we had one hive that had a bunch of queen cells in here that was about to swarm, so we split it five ways. Instead of just being able to split it twice, [we] split it five ways so that was cool.”

Have you ever gotten stung?

“Yeah, a lot.”

How many times do you usually get stung during a harvest, if you can count them?

“It depends. It depends on the tolerance of the hive, how mean the hive is.”

After a while do you get immune to it basically?

“You feel it but it doesn’t affect you as much like ‘oh’ there’s another sting.”[penci_authors_box_2 style_block_title=”style-title-11″ columns=”columns-2″ post_desc_length=”20″ number=”2″ order_by=”user_registered” include=”99, 100″ block_id=”penci_authors_box_2-1573425678118″ custom_markup_1=””]