By The Numbers & Honey Day Pics

Sometimes it is good to record the “counts”. I’m not so good at tracking hives, honey supers, mite counts, and other metrics month-to-month that can be helpful for beekeepers. So wanted publish the Our Bright Acres “numbers” for 2024. It was our biggest year-to-date in several respects. I’m including a number of “technical aspects” in this post that I’m not going to explain the details of, but feel free to ask if really interested.

• Production colonies: 13 (6 overwintered, 7 new packages)
• Splits: 1 (lower than usual)
• June nucs: 2 (my dad got these from Golden Ridge HF for his property)
• Swarm captures: 1
• Supers harvested: 48 (much more than usual)
• Total estimated lbs of honey: 1640 lbs
• Per honey super average: 34.2 lbs (lower than usual)
• Comb honey supers: 0 (maybe next year)
• Per hive average: 125 lbs
• Estimated capping honey: 215 lbs (not spun, but from uncapping tubs)
• Percent capping honey: 13.1%
• “Other” honey est: 385 lbs
• Estimated sellable: 1050 lbs

On some of these values, it’s easy to make a calculation mistake, so I caveat that in advance.

It was a great day and a long day that we spent on September 14th spinning out and bottling all the honey – phew! We had such great help again and we always want to give a big thank you to our sweet helpers. This year – my parents, Spearys, Knolls, Cullens, my brother and others.

For comparison with last year, in 2023 we spun out 1130 lbs, which is 510 lbs less on a similar number of hives. Now this is pretty understandable when we consider that 2023 was a drought year – very little rain until into August whereas we had above average rainfall this past spring.

In order to get through the roughly 460 honey frames of honey, we fully loaded our 15 frame extractor for most of the spins. Sometimes we’d need to respin with less frame like what looks like below because it was out of balance, but in general, it worked well. I noticed that we can’t get quite as much honey spun out of the frames as we used to several years ago when we were doing tangential arrangement spins because when I spot checked some boxes after spinning they would be around 19 lbs, verses it was common to see 17 lb empty boxes before. Now, that may not be just because of “radial” frame spinning, but it is likely due to build up of crystalized honey in some cells or in the bottom of cells because we store the frames “wet” for re-use the following year. So the 19 lb empty box average was then used this year for the honey amount calculations given earlier. Otherwise the total lb count would have been 100 lbs more.

While the per-hive average was up and the number of honey supers I removed was quite a bit more than last year, the per-super average of lbs of honey was less. I was providing them more supers than they could fill. And while it looked like they “finished out” the honey drying-down OK, they didn’t draw out the cells as thickly or pack in as much honey on the frames. But that is OK – lighter boxes are little easier to manage 🙂

We have been setting aside a certain amount of honey to sell in “bulk” (20 lbs or more) for each of the past years. This year is no different. We reserved several hundred lbs for bulk sales, but only 2 weeks later and the majority of that is already sold out. It goes fast folks! The majority of what we sell during the year though is what we bottle on honey day.

And in another month or so we should have a fresh batch of creamed honey available. The “creaming process” takes time and I’m using a little over 3 lbs of our own creamed honey from last year to seed the process as the mini-crystals permeates the honey in our garage over the next few weeks. Fall temps help with that.