January 19, 2012 – 6:00 am
Once you’ve harvested your natural honeycomb from your Warré (or other kind of top bar) beehive, it’s time to make get some of that goodness into jars! Fortunately, like many other aspects of natural beekeeping, getting the honey out of natural comb is easy and simple, once you know how.
We’re just at the start of our beekeeping journey, but still, even though we don’t have whizz-bang equipment, we found this a wonderfully tactile and rewarding experience. It’s prettymuch just a case of crushing the comb, sieving it, and bottling the results. 100% organic yum, with all the goodness of the honey still utterly intact.
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January 6, 2012 – 6:00 am
Bit of a mid-summer treat yesterday: Tim Malfroy came to help check our Warré beehives and bliss us out with amazing discussions on pollination, super organisms and honey. We got some amazing photos of summer in beeland.
Summer in the Australian bush (in a good year) is like nirvana for honey bees, thanks to the abundance of flowering eucalyptus. So much nectar. So much pollen. The Milkwood Farm bees are going nuts!
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December 21, 2011 – 6:00 am
The super-organism of the honeybee (apis mellifera) is not only awe-inspiring, it’s worth understanding. Both for your own personal gratification, and for the pollination of your nation.
This list is a part of the notes we provide to students at the Natural Beekeeping courses we run with Tim Malfroy. It’s a list of Tim’s favorite books on bees, garnered from a lifetime of active research, practice, and discussion. Read More »
December 11, 2011 – 6:00 am
We just capped off a massive week at Milkwood Farm – running our last on-farm course till next year, farewelling 6 interns, harvesting honey and braiding garlic.
Summer seems determined to skip us this year. It’s now December and we’re still in winter jackets, and eating all the soup we can. What does it all mean? I’m not sure. But no matter what the future brings, we will need to keep picking broadbeans. Of this we can be certain. Read More »
December 1, 2011 – 6:00 am
I am incredibly excited to report that we’ve just harvested our first ever box of honey from one of our warré beehives. Whoohoo! We are now awash and dripping with organic warré honeycomb. Sweet.
The box we took is from the warré hive that had two colonies combined in it last year because of the terrible season. This hive is now incredibly strong and healthy, and building comb and storing honey like there’s no tomorrow. Read More »
October 13, 2011 – 6:00 am
We’ve all been a bit in love with bees around here, ever since we met Tim Malfroy. Actually I liked bees before that, but Tim got us seriously hooked.
We’re now aiming to create a truly fabulous Warré apiary at Milkwood Farm that can showcase small-farm natural beekeeping at its best. And produce many buckets of organic, ethical honey. Yum.
So Tim came to Milkwood last week and spent some time with our interns to help them design the new Milkwood apiary… Read More »
September 26, 2011 – 6:00 am
Last weekend Tim Malfroy checked Belinda’s bees at her small urban apiary in Sydney. This is the apiary we take our Sydney Natural Beekeeping students to as part of their course, so it was great to see how the hive had wintered. Spring has sprung in Sydney, and the bees were busily buzzing!
Belinda’s warré beehive has been going since early spring last year, and it seems to be a fine example of urban warré beekeeping. Five boxes high, and full of honey, healthy brood and happy bees. The hive is located in Belinda’s chicken run, which has a couple of benefits… Read More »
I am pleased to say that our emergency measure of combining two Warré beehive colonies at Milkwood Farm seems to have worked. The two colonies have made friends, combined, and are now operating as one big family (or super organism, to be technical).
Time to bed the new uber-colony down for winter, following one last inspection as part of our first on-farm natural beekeeping course. As i write this, the bees are now tucked up against the cold, with an extra box of honey on top to keep them supplied till spring. We won’t bother them until then, for a couple of reasons… Read More »
Recently I watched Tim Malfroy open and inspect a Warré hive that he installed in Sydney. Over 20 people looked on (it was part of a natural beekeeping workshop) as Tim lifted up boxes, pulled out combs full of honey and brood, and generally checked that all was well in the hive.
What did the bees do during this? Nothing. Nothing at all except keep on buzzing about happily. And that is just unheard of. Read More »
As explained in Putting our honey where our mouth is, this year has been a tough one for our new Warré beehives, and for bees in general throughout the central west. Torrential, unseasonal rain for much of late spring and into summer meant that many flowering plants had their regular cycles thrown off course, and many did not flower as per usual over spring and summer this year.
Less blossoms means tough times for pollinators, including bees. Our colonies have struggled to forage enough pollen and nectar to keep themselves going, so to get through this winter they’re going to need some help. The conventional practice of feeding them sugar syrup all winter isn’t an option we want to follow, so Tim (our fab Warré beekeeper) came up with a plan, which just might work! Read More »
