Rogue Farms Beekeeping 101: The Swarm

Swarming season is here. We say relax and enjoy it. It's good times for honeybees. Here's what you need to know.

Taking Care Of Our Honeybees

Autumn is one of the busiest times of year for the beekeeper at Rogue Farms.

There’s no more wild sources of nectar and pollen for our honeybees to forage and soon it will be too cold for them to leave the hive. So in the next few weeks our beekeeper has 7,140,289 mouths to feed, medicate and shelter before winter arrives.

The bees took care of us this spring and summer by pollinating our crops and making the honey we used in our kolsch, mead, braggot and sodas. Now it’s our turn to take care of them.

A scene from this year’s honey harvest at Rogue Farms.

Honey Construction Season

Here’s the deadline we can’t put off at the Rogue Farms Hopyard.

In about three weeks, someone’s going to pull up in a big truck and unload 100 starter hives, also known as nucs. It’s a huge expansion of the Rogue Hopyard apiary.

That gives us three weeks to finish constructing 200 new hive boxes and 200 new super boxes. Otherwise the new honeybees won’t have a place to live.

Start Of The Spring Nectar Flow

When the first flowers of the season appeared in our neighbor’s cherry orchard, we knew the spring nectar flow had begun.

This is one of the prettiest times of the year on the Rogue Farms Hopyard. And for the Rogue Honeybees, one of the busiest.

Honey Laundering

Rogue Beekeeper Josh Cronin visits a hive in early spring.

Shortly after we wrote about the honey detective in Texas, comes this story about honey laundering.

Two of the country’s largest honey packers admit to taking part in a plan to mislabel honey from China and pretending that it came from other countries. The federal government says they did so to avoid paying $180 million in import duties that only apply to Chinese honey.

We wouldn’t know how to buy Chinese honey even if we wanted to do it. Instead, we’ll make more honey this year by growing it at the Rogue Farms Hopyard in Independence, Oregon. We’re adding another 100 hives to our Original 19 Colonies, which means adding roughly another 5,000,000 honeybees and producing another 4,200 pounds of Rogue Wildflower Honey.

If you want to know the origin of the honey we use in our 19 Original Colonies Mead, then please come out to the Rogue Farms Hopyard and see for yourself.

 

CSI Rogue Hopyard

The Rogue Honeybees are like tiny CSI investigators. Buzzing around the Hopyard they gather evidence – better known as pollen and nectar – from thousands of blooms.

Depending on the season, they forage at our Big Leaf Maples, apple and walnut trees, pumpkin flowers, wild blackberries, raspberries, hazelnuts, cherries or one of the gazillions of wildflowers that pop up from spring through fall.

The honey produced by the Rogue Honeybees is like a fingerprint filled with clues about where the bees were during the season and what they were eating. And like a lot of other fingerprints, investigators are using them to solve crimes.

Mighty Mites And Virulent Viruses

We’re always looking at the latest research on honeybee health.

Colony Collapse Disorder isn’t quite the headline grabbing crisis that it was a few years ago, but it’s still a serious problem that shows no signs of going away. No one is really sure what causes CCD, it’s probably several factors. And no one knows how to cure it.

So CCD is something we have to learn to manage. With another 7 million Rogue Honeybees arriving at Rogue Farms this spring and summer, we better learn quickly.

Here’s some of the highlights from a recent honeybee health conference.