Bees

Like a lot of the things we do on the farm, we started out our bee operation on a small personal scale so that we could get to know the process. For the first couple of years we had just two hives and some basic extracting equipment. It was a great learning experience and a lot of fun, we also had our fair share of stings along the way. Now we have 50 hives spread over a few locations on the farm and recently had our first major harvest. We haven't decided yet how we will get the honey to market, but if you do come accross MCNF honey, grab a jar, it's fabulous!

Quite often Bee Keepers (Apiarists) have to move the hives from place to place to ensure the bees get enough pollen, propolis and nectar. We don’t want to disrupt the home sites of our bees, so it is important to make sure they have ample choice and supply of their favorite foods. Unlike a lot of enterprises on a farm, bee keeping is a really good venture to have in times of drought. Bees don’t like flying in wet and windy conditions so they stay home and eat up all their stored honey! When it’s dry and calm they happily go out to work.

Another interesting thing to note is that truely "organic" honey is hard to come by because bees will fly upto 5km to feed, so in order to guarantee that they have not visited plants that have been explosed to chemicals, a radius of 5km must be allowed for foraging. This is just not possible for smaller properties, but luckily - we've got plenty of room for happy, biodynamic foraging.