Subject: [Part 2] How Much Honey Can You Harvest In A Year?

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"How Much Honey Can You Harvest In a Year? Part #2"

This is an age-old question that hits high on the frequently asked questions list... We thought we would open the topic and share insights for your input and feedback!

It's not an easy question to answer. There are at least 14 variables we are touching on below which will have influence your harvest in a given 12-month period and beyond...

Buzz along with us on this journey. This is a series of emails. This is part 2!

What Are Major and Minor Honey Producing Variables When You Want To Work Out Honey Production?

3) Size Does Matter (Of Your Colony)

So, you've just started out with beekeeping and want to harvest 10kg of honey within your first season. Well, if you'd come on one of our Easy Buzzing Bee courses or Online MasterClass, you would know that that is possible but takes fast learning and good application of beekeeping skills.

When you start out with bees and a new colony - which is measured in terms of the number of frames that have brood comb built and drawn out on them - you may have 2-4 frames. If you buy a colony then you're likely to have 4 - 5 frames from a nuc box or catch box that is transferred into a brood chamber / deep box with 10 frames in it. This allows for space for the colony to grow.

At this stage, being a new colony it is still very much in its building phase of life. A brood frame can take about a week to 10-days to build while the queen bee will laying 1500-2000 eggs a day. This output does vary again - with reference to part 1 of this series - depending on food available and so on.

The better the food the faster the colony develops and expands in population and comb!
The size of the colony determines the total workforce that can forage for nectar and pollen.
At the start, there are many workers focused on building, nursing and cleaning and fewer on collecting food and water.
Once a colony reaches 8-frames in the brood chamber it is deemed ready for pollination contracts as a standard.
Queen bees also make a difference which we will discuss in a later part of this series.

How Big is Big?

Once a colony reaches 8-frames in size of brood frames with the comb drawn out it marks time for adding a super chamber to the hive set up. Not before.

The workforce has reached a population level where it has swung from focusing on building and nursing to one that is now investing the majority of its resources on foraging. Nursing and building continue however the ratio for such duties drops in relation to the overall distribution of workforce usage.

Once the brood chamber has 10-frames full of comb and a constant turnover of eggs, larvae and emerging worker bees, the colony is best suited to take advantage of available forage. It can only do so up until this point and beyond if there is enough food to sustain the time line.

When there is a strong nectar flow, the colony can now support additional super chambers being added to the hive complex. In the days before the Capensis threat in South Africa, hives stood as tall as a person and potentially more so with 6, 7 and even 8 supers to a colony. (Capensis threatens the Scutellata sister species as a pest however may still enjoy these types of numbers when it comes to farming them in the Western Cape Province.)

I've spoken at length assuming all of you reading this are using Langstroth bee hives. In fact, a good deal may be using KTBs (Kenyan Top Bar hives) in which case the same type of numbers work well. You may want to have at least 10-frames of KTBs style before considering the full production level of that colony.

Bees will still store excess honey even within the first frame. However, in order to provide excess stores for beekeepers to harvest one should not harvest within the building time frame as described above. It will dampen the overall output over time for your colony.

Adding a super chamber or for KTBs, exposing more available frames, can take place once the current super chamber's frames have been drawn out and filled to about 8-frames. It is good practice to have at least one spare super chamber to each hive in your apiary. This allows for you to swap out a full super chamber with an empty one while harvesting takes place. If you do not do this, you will encourage swarming and lose a good deal of your production workforce, not to mention additional honey production.

How you harvest has a massive impact on your overall production too. We reveal why in a later part of this series...

Online Masterclasses

4) Quality Of Your Queen Bee

One of the biggest factors in any colony is the quality of the queen. She determines just about everything that goes on using pheromones. The chemical gets dispersed throughout the colony by workers. She determines the amount of propolis, pollen, nectar and water that is collected and is solely responsible for the egg production.

The best quality queen bees lay 2000 eggs a day in the spring and summer seasons. Mating with 20+ male drones on their mating flights and now store every sperm for future use. High quality queens will live 3 years before their pheromones wane and become markedly weak while also losing fertility. Whenever this stage occurs for a queen bee, the colony will replace her with a successor using a supercedure queen cell. (We recently made a video of the different types of queen cells and why it's important to know them. Watch Below!)

queens determine the overall health of the colony
the more mating partners the better laying output and diversity in genetic material determining the ability for specialist skills within the colony
laying output determines population size effecting honey production
manage space to allow for expanding laying space to maximise workforce
some beekeepers replace queen bees after a set time
some colonies are highly defensive, others produce more propolis than most and others are prolific swarming agents - manage the queens in these cases

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How To Tell Different Types of Queen Bee Cells

5) Type Of Hive Design

The materials and design of a bee hive can vastly influence the amount of honey you harvest in a year. See below our top reasons why:

Different designs may require different processing choices once you harvest honey
The pros of one hive may be the cons of another of course
Budget plays a huge role in choice of bee hive
Environmental impact may be a factor where trees and ring barked to make hives causing loss of trees and bee practices that are not sustainable
Overall production may be hampered due to lack of ability to add components to expand honey storage
Mobility and the ease of transporting hives is a major factor to be explored in our part #3 of the series.
Method of extraction from hives differs effecting production

Your type of hive is determined largely by a few factors. Not the least being the budget involved and the favoured design within your beekeeping industry. For example, the Langstroth hive is the undisputed industry favourite in South Africa. There are some amazing designs and developments that have emerged from within this singularly focused hive industry while winning major financial and design awards!

South African Hive Innovation Amidst Langstroth Favour

There's the Bee Pak hive, which won the Popular Mechanic Invention of the Year 2014 competition of R1 million and was designed by a Cape Town based beekeeping duo. A composite bee hive with interlocking components making it fire resistant and a very long lifespan.

The Bee Bunka, which is a low-cost, low weight, concrete-based hive which is available with moulds to mix and make your own on site at your apiary. It's fire proof and badger resistant. As with the Bee Pak, the Bee Bunka frames are interchangeable with Langstroth ones.

The Jackson Hive, designed and developed by the Jackson family and used extensively in North Africa is based on Kenyan top bar hive design with distinct innovations that benefit the inner workings of a wild natural colony. Tim Jackson passed away about a decade ago and the hive stopped being produced.

All of these are locally innovated and developed bee hives in South Africa regardless that the industry is locked into the Langstroth hive as the Godfather of bee hives.

I've met with all of these designers and tested their products. There's much to be said for their ability to compete and in some cases, within parameters like location and needs, they show a great opportunity for outdoing the Langstroth Hive. After all, the Langstroth design hasn't enjoyed much innovation since the 1950s. I will do a special side series on these in the coming weeks...

We supply Bee Bunka and Bee Pak hives from our shop in Centurion.

*Jackson hives may be available upon request for minimum orders of 20 units.

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More to follow in the series: Weather. Mobile or static hive? Your management or pests, brood space & Supers. Method of extraction. Starter strips or full wax sheets used?