Probably not the best way to start to a blog but unfortunately it’s accurate.

When we come into the Spring of 2025 we only had five hives. As a consequence we knew we had to have a season of making more bees.

Now the general rule of thumb is you have a choice. You make honey or you make bees but there really isn’t enough time in a season to do both so we knew we were going to be on a crash course for making more bees and for-going honey production for 2025.

When all was said done and in the autumn of 2025, we actually found we had 45 frames (from the now 18 hives) that were partially filled with honey that we could extract. So we did get some honey and very nice it was too.

So we didn’t have a lot of jars to sell and the uptake was quite good and as a result the end is now neigh.

We could go out and purchase honey from another honey supplier, but it’s not something we really want to do. When you start purchasing honey from different places you can never really guarantee exactly what you’re getting and we don’t want to take a risk of selling funny honey that maybe fake.

So next year we will be building up even more and try to produce enough of a honey crop that we can keep our local and regular customers happy without running out right through to the following season .

This is what we’ll be attempting to do from June 2026 onwards.

Having more hives made up in 2025 allows us to build even more hives in 2026 faster and in greater numbers while still continuing to build up using only the local population and splits made by the bees themselves.