We recently went to visit our apiary site in Mpumalanga, South Africa. A 3hour trip takes you into fantastic honey bee country with abundant bee plants.
We got a call from the farmer we work with on our major apiary site saying that all of the beehives we put out end of August were now full. Please bring some more!!
So, we did! We went up on Monday the 4th Oct to take another 10 catch boxes and set them out on Tuesday morning. After moving the bee hives we put up in August to shady areas on the farm the night was finished.
We put the empty catch boxes or nuc boxes out on Tuesday morning at 9h30 and left the farm site at 10h30. Excellent beekeeping job done!
Later that afternoon around 17h00 we get a call from the farmer askign if we arrived home alright. Affirmative. He then goes on to say that the bee catch box we put out by the house already had bees in it! Can't ask for more than that!!
That should mean we are on a count of 28 honeybee colonies. Our aim for the 2010 summer honey bee season is to have 70 - 100 colonies so we can leverage the established colonies in the Spring of 2011. The goal is to leverage the large colonies in 2011 so that we can make 5-10 times the number of bees from this small strong established apiary.
The UJU Honey goal is to manage 1000 bee hives in 3 years. We officially launched this project at the end of 2009. We started off with a small apiary of as few as 2 bee hives. Since then, we have visited numerous farms to assess them as viable permanent bee apiary sites. We prefer not to move our honeybee colonies. Our apiary site criteria is such that the colonies we place on the property should sustain the bees throughout the year as well as provide excess honey for UJU Honey to harvest.
The challenge for us is to find suitable apiary sites where the farmer or land owner agrees to our proposal of the apiary management project. To find enough food for 1000 hives requires a rough estimate of 1000 HA of good quality bee food.
If you are a farmer looking for a serious increase in your crop yield while at the same time enjoying permanent honey bee presence on your farm then we would like to discuss our Apiary Management Proposal with you.
Call us on 082 359 8787 now to set up an appointment.
