Hackszine.com: Backyard beekeeping

Backyard beekeeping - 120 pounds of honey

treasure stolen gold
low the sun and busy bees
prepare for winter

We collected honey from our two backyard hives this fall and I've finally finished jarring it. The new hive, split from last year's hive, produced over 20 pounds of honey. This is more than our first hive produced last year, but the older hive was not to be outdone.

Queen Ann, in the second year of her reign, ran a very productive operation. Her daughters produced some of the lightest, most delightful honey I've ever had. The water content is so low that it pours out like a sheet of glass, folding at the bottom like you might expect from taffy.

From Ann's hive, we collected 100 pounds of honey, making the grand total 120 pounds between the two hives. This is the part we harvested. We leave enough behind for the bees to survive on during the long Minnesota winter, which amounts to another 80-100 pounds.

What's incredible is that all of this honey is produced from the flowers, trees, and vegetable gardens within a 2-3 mile radius of the hives. Two years ago, before I began this hobby, I wouldn't have thought this was possible in the city.

If you're interested in starting a backyard hive next spring, this is what you can look forward to. The real challenge of this urban agricultural experiment is to figure out what to do with the harvest.

Previously
Backyard beekeeping - splitting a hive

Posted by Jason Striegel | Nov 18, 2008 10:38 PM
Food, Home, Outdoor, Science, Survival | Permalink | Comments (7)

Comments

Newest comments listed first.

Posted by: bachterman on November 19, 2008 at 12:00 AM

oh wow, that is a lot of honey!
maybe you should bake some cakes with it. or sell it as novelty.

Posted by: Elijah on November 19, 2008 at 10:13 AM

You could try making some Meade (Honey Wine) with it.

Here's a great resource for Meade making:
http://www.stormthecastle.com/mead/index.htm

And a really cool no-equipment way to get started:
http://www.stormthecastle.com/mead/fast-cheap-mead-making.htm

I've actually been interested in trying a batch myself (setting it up for St Patty's day next year). If your interested in parting with (read: selling) about 6-10 lbs, then email me.

I'd love to see how it turns out if you tried it, could come up with a hack to make it easier I suppose ;)

Posted by: Martin on November 19, 2008 at 2:49 PM

Hackszine is seriously running offtopic. What in the world does bees have to do with hacking? I'd be pleased to see more hacking articles (jailbreaking and such) and fewer Makezine cross-posts. At one update a day, you should really have loads of material to choose from. So why choose honey?

Posted by: Jason Striegel on November 19, 2008 at 3:19 PM

Martin - Thanks for the comment, but I'm afraid I disagree. There are lots of ways to making hacking a part of your life besides just owning the latest gadgets or writing clever code.

I write crazy software all day. I work on robots some evenings. In the summer, I found an efficient way to make over 100 pounds of food in a 2ft x 2ft section of a city yard. There are other people who work on blimps, or bicycles, or send measuring equipment up in rockets, and I admire all those things from a hacker's perspective.

Things like DIY agriculture, physics, home efficiency, photography, astronomy, and other educational or scientific pursuits—especially when it enables thought and exploration outside of what is normally available to the average hacker—that's all fair game too.

I dig the stuff you're talking about as well. If you have anything important that we should be posting, please contribute and send in a link.

Posted by: Martin on November 20, 2008 at 2:38 PM

It's not that I don't like things and activities other than hacking; I too enjoy photography, astronomy and honey. :)
That's why I spend half my time at the computer reading Makezine and Instructables about that.
It's just that *Hacks*-zine, I think, should be about electronics and software; things related to hacking.
So unless you can hack your bees, I don't think they belong here. :)

Posted by: Eric Smith on November 22, 2008 at 6:57 PM

Hack your bees

...you mean, like this?

http://www.cposc.org/slides/2008/cposc2008-smith-honeybees.pdf

Posted by: Jason Striegel on November 22, 2008 at 8:18 PM

@Eric

That is awesome! Thanks for the link.