2017 Honey Frame

Golden Lucina Brood Frame

Artifact Coffee House

Moving bees at night

Golden Lucina Brood Frame

Queen

Support your local farmer

Here are the stamps we're going to be using this spring to focus on awareness about supporting your local farmer

This is one of my favorite pictures. It was taken during our Maryland honeyflow and bees were bunched up trying to deliver their sweet nectar back to the hive.

Here we're adding hives that we pulled from another yard to make alfalfa honey with.

Sunset in the mating NUC yard. The yellow color of the liquid in the jar feeders is not honey. Its a mixture of proteins, essential oils and vitamins. This is to ensure that the queens raised in these boxes have the best source of nutrients.

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Thomas, is ready to feed bees!

They filled in the honey supers just fine this year!

If you look to the right of this beehive you will see white..... that is snow! Its amazing how these bees are making so much warmth that they are walking around eating on a cold snowy day.

Here we're inspecting a frame of honey. You'll see the dark ring in the middle and think its pollen. It actually isn't pollen, its a darker honey from a different source of nectar, which is most likely poplar.

The bees decided to hang out on top of the hive for some reason.

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Here is a split we made up during a honey flow. It started off as a 6 frame nuc of solid brood and 4 drawn frames of empty comb. This is what is looked like a month and a half or so later.

Here is the first bit of honey from our 2016 honey extraction. This year we have extracted 8,000lbs of honey. Shown is one of our 3 honey extractors.

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Here you see bees bringing in pollen. The pollen you see is most likely from Goldenrod from our fall flow.

Here you see one of 3 alfalfa fields that are on our main farm in full bloom. A lot of other beekeepers wonder how we can sell local alfalfa honey, and here it is! We make approximately 2,000lbs of alfalfa honey across an entire year. The alfalfa fields are cut down after 2 weeks of blooms to make hay with. Then the cycle of blooms starts again about 3 weeks later.

Buckwheat blooms! Every fall we plant about 40 acres of buckwheat for the local wildlife, including our bees. We make about 2 - 55 gallon drums of buckwheat honey.

Mating nuc yard.

Here you'll see us converting 10 frame colonies into 8 frame colonies. We're moving our operation to 8 frame starting late 2016. The entire switch over should be complete in 2017.

Here is a batch of private label honey we put together for one of our honey retailers

Here is a batch of private label honey we put together for one of our honey retailers

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Here is Thomas, future owner, getting his suit on to start feeding bees.