Ah spring. Cool mornings turning to warm afternoons, everything blooming and smelling lovely. We all know how the waking of the flora and fauna affect us, perhaps no other as bees, whose very life depends on the blossoms of a number of plants, trees, and flowers.
And as we also know, where there are bees, there’s usually honey. Not just one or two different kinds, but about as many blossoming things that there are in the world. Clover, apple blossom, wildflower, locust, buckwheat, the list goes on and delightfully on.
But something I discovered recently on a trip to the North Hills headquarters of Maple Valley Farms is that bees (the workers in particular) have just 6 weeks or so to reap the benefits of spring or summer offerings so that we may enjoy their life’s purpose whenever there’s an excess of that glorious golden sweetener that many of us wouldn’t want to live without. What I also didn’t know is just how MANY bees it takes to actually make enough honey for their own survival plus some for the rest of us.
According to Kathy Guthry, who, along with husband Mike own & operate Maple Valley Farms, the average hive has about 60,000 bees and a good production from a healthy hive will yield about 200 lbs. of honey. As one can see from the snapshot, a production hive looks quite different than what many of us may envision but bees will set up shop just about anywhere the queen chooses to land (or where Mike, more the beekeeper than Kathy, chooses to put her).