This Just In: Tyler’s Spring Honey

Tyler’s honey bees have been working hard this spring, so it’s fair to assume that they haven’t read the May 26 Bloomberg Businessweek article proclaiming that “America Can’t Produce Enough Honey.” They’d be shocked to learn that the U.S. Department of Agriculture recently reported that honey production is at an all-time low, particularly since Tyler’s beekeepers harvested a portion of their spring honey that very day.

But it’s true that, nationwide, beekeepers are making less honey. Part of that is due to commercial beekeepers using bees to pollinate agricultural crops, rather than dedicating colonies to making honey. Even for beekeepers who specialize in honey, however, the size of a honey harvest depends on how they manage each colony so that it produces a surplus.

The bees’ goal is to collect enough resources for the colony to survive, reproduce, and persist through the following winter. The beekeeper’s goal is to persuade them to make a little more than “enough.”

Spring into Swarming

For a healthy, growing colony in springtime, the main focus is not to make honey. Rather, it’s to reproduce the colony by swarming. A swarm occurs when the queen, the mother of all the bees in the hive, leaves the colony with roughly half of the female worker bees to find a new home. The remaining bees raise a new queen, which must mate with unrelated male bees before continuing to grow the original colony.

From the colony’s perspective, swarming is a sign of success. From the beekeeper’s standpoint, though, it’s a setback, because it results in a smaller honey harvest. Before a colony swarms, the bees fill up on nectar to fuel themselves on their journey to their new home. After they’re gone, the colony needs to focus on raising a new queen and replenishing their population. This means less energy goes towards foraging for nectar and making surplus honey.

Swarming may cause other issues besides lost honey production. Honey bees are not native to the U.S.—they are a managed species, imported by European colonists in the 1600s. Although feral colonies can and do survive in the wild, most swarms that come from managed colonies do not. They’re also likely to end up establishing themselves in roofs and other dwellings, where they can be destructive and expensive to remove.

Sweet Success

It’s difficult to thwart the natural swarming instinct. But beekeepers spend “swarm season”—in our area this is typically anywhere from mid-March to mid-June—trying their best. Some set traps to lure swarming bees. Others pro-actively split their colonies using a variety of methods. Just as farmers take measures to prevent domesticated livestock from reproducing unchecked, beekeepers try to manage swarming.

Tyler’s beekeepers tried a variety of swarm management techniques this year. Keeping swarming at bay in three colonies through May 26 allowed us to harvest a surplus honey crop of about 50 pounds, while leaving plenty for the bees.

It takes nectar from about two million flowers to make one pound of honey, and each bee can only make about 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey in its lifetime. So we know Tyler’s bees have been busy at the blooms – no matter what Bloomberg reports!

We hope you enjoy Tyler’s spring honey!

Note: A limited quantity is available for sale at our Visitor Center while supplies last!