Another very different year for the bees during 2024.
After a hard winter we had the highest winter losses to date. It was a very wet spring and while the bees built up well there was not enough nectar to create a spring surplus to extract. Any honey there was, we left for the bees to tide them over until the summer flow. The spring flowers were early and they finished flowering mid rather than at the end of May as usual. Most years there is a gap between the spring flowers and the summer of between one and two weeks. Last year was an exceptional 5 weeks!
Most years, we get 60% of our honey in the spring so to get nothing was a setback. Fortunately, the bees compensated for this by bringing in an exceptionally large summer crop that made up the shortage from the spring.
The spread of Borage being planted helped with this. We saw several field margins around Lavenham planted with Borage for the first time. This made up the quantity and has made the honey lighter in colour.
Happily we saw no repeat of the outbreak of chronic bee paralysis virus and had very few summer losses of colonies. The bees went into winter very strong.
In February 2024 we attended the Beekeeping Trade Show in Telford to promote our beeswax cosmetics. This went really well and we now supply over 50 Beekeepers and Beefarmers around the U.K. including our white label service, designing and printing bespoke labels with the help of Spingold Printers in Nayland.
Kevin’s health has continued to improve during the year and the honey was all taken off this year and extracted with Roxie’s help. Kevin did four talks during 2024 with the Bee Improvement and Bee Breeders Association on keeping bees profitably to audiences looking to make money from their beekeeping. Kevin is now on the British Beekeepers Association national speakers list.
Kevin is keen to talk at more Beekeeping Associations and we have a list of Bee Talks available.
Julie will continue to wholesale our Honey Jars while expanding our beeswax cosmetics and white labelling service. We also made 240 of our Wild Orange Lip Balms as Corporate Gifts for an Insurance company and this is an area we would like to develop.
We are looking forward to the new season and the surprises it will inevitably bring. Thank you to all of our landlords where we keep our Beehives, our customers who supply our honey, our beekeepers who supply our beeswax cosmetics and to all the customers who buy our honey and beeswax products.
Kevin & Julie & Roxie
