There’s nothing more important to the sustainability of most beekeeping operations than the ability to maximise honey production. John Berry has been seeking to continuously improve yields for more than half a century. He shares some of what he has learned.
By John Berry
You can’t get a good honey crop every year no matter how good a beekeeper you are. Sometimes the weather is against you. In fact, more often than not this seems to be the case and sometimes things just don’t flower very well, or you run up against competition from native solitary bees, or other beekeepers.
What you can do is make the most of what you can get and by doing this well you can have a 10-year average that is both respectable and profitable.
New Zealand’s current average production per-hive is somewhere around 20 to 30kg, which is pretty pathetic and there are many beekeepers doing a lot better than that. So there must be plenty doing a lot worse. I think a lot of this comes from the idea that more hives means more honey, whereas the reality is that on average a given area can only support X number of hives. Beyond that point you might conceivably get more honey in total, but you will always get less honey per hive.
Correct stocking rates can take years to get right, but you can’t go too wrong if you start low and work your way up.
The Apiary
Warm, dry, sheltered, sunny and accessible to vehicles are crucial. In hilly country it should be as near the bottom of the hill as possible, without being in a frost pocket. All day sun is best but – despite popular opinion – if I had to choose, I would go for afternoon rather than morning sun. The warmer the better. If you feel like you’re dying of heatstroke taking off honey in summer, then it is about right for the bees.
Apart from very dry or very wet areas, most places in New Zealand will give a reasonable honey crop most of the time, but if you can find somewhere with multiple potential honey flows you will normally do better.
How you set your hives up is important, as drifting can have a dramatic effect on honey production. Palletised or not, I prefer my hives in groups of four with each hive facing a different direction. I will not keep bees anywhere I cannot set up to drive between the hives. Boxes of honey are heavy enough without having to carry them more than a few steps. Hives set up in long lines not only cause drifting, but also poorer mating results.
If you are lucky enough to keep bees in areas that can support large numbers of hives, I have found that splitting the apiary into two groups a little way apart is also beneficial. Some long-time research my father did many years ago gave a benefit of about 5kg per hive just through properly setting an apiary up.
The Hive
The aim is to have every hive in the apiary at full strength by the start of the main honey flow. That’s not always easy and for many areas the start of the main flow can vary considerably from year to year. However, do your best to get your hives strong and even. There is no point in having one weak hive and another one swarming beside it.
Good queens are essential. The vast majority of my requeening has always been in the autumn and I expect my queens to last for two seasons. I see no significant difference in honey production between first season and second season queens and, as far as swarming goes, it seems to be slightly worse in the first season queens.
As for swarming, do not ever let your hives swarm. In a bad swarming season it is better to weaken the hives to the point where they no longer want to swarm than to let them go. This will reduce your potential honey crop, but nowhere near as much as swarming, especially just before the main honey flow.
I like to keep a number of spare hives to patch up any problems in the spring. This is especially important on palletized hives as they basically all have to get boxes at the same time. Keeping bees on pallets forces you to equalise hives when necessary and this is a very valuable lesson when it comes to honey production.
There is a lot of debate about whether you should keep the queen in one brood box or two. I did some quite extensive trials many years ago and they came out firmly on the side of two. Many won’t agree with this, but it is what we found.
The Queen
How important is good breeding and breeder selection? I’ll go out on a limb here and say that the best queens these days produce more than twice what the average hives did 50 years ago. There are many things you need to select for in a breeder queen, but fortunately the most productive hives tend to tick most of the other boxes.
Most of the costs are the same for an unproductive hive as a productive hive. Proper selection can easily add 10 to 20% to your crop if you are starting from a low point and even 5% makes a big difference over a thousand hives.
When to Take Honey Off
Early in the season, if there are still good prospects, I don’t like letting hives get too full as they will cram the brood nest down and this reduces further prospects for honey. If your hives are all even then they will all be full at the same time. This makes life a lot easier.
If hives get full, many beekeepers just keep adding supers until the end of the season. This is better than nothing, but you will get more honey if you take the boxes off when full. Normally I run my hives with two honey supers and after the first cut, unless prospects are amazing, just with one.
The reality of beekeeping is that New Zealand hives don’t fill two full-depth boxes, on average, and three boxes containing maybe70 kg of honey is way above average. That doesn’t mean you can’t get more and, in those years when all the stars align, it can be a real struggle to keep up.
I used to run 2000 hives with my brother and one year we took off honey 30 days straight. 120 full depth boxes per load and some days we would go out and get another partial load close to home and we still weren’t keeping up. So, if we had the energy, we would go out by ourselves and get a full load each. Well over 4000 boxes in 30 days.
Another year all our mānuka hives were full by New Year. The next 10 days were cold and drizzly and we spent a miserable time taking off honey every day, at the end of which we thought, why did we bother doing that? In the end it turned out to be one of the latest mānuka crops I’ve ever seen and we got another two or three full boxes per hive.
Taking off honey during the honey flow is also a pleasure, with no robbing to contend with. Towards the end of the season I like hives to cram down a bit so they have plenty of stores for winter. Having all the hives with one honey super at the end of the season also makes it far quicker getting the last of the honey off, so that you can begin your autumn varroa treatment.
One thing we have found over the years, which seems to be peculiar to mānuka, is that when the mānuka is finished flowering hives are often very reluctant to move on to any other flowers. By removing the honey, you not only keep it pure, but it also incentivise the bees to work something else.
Late flows don’t happen every year, but when they do you need to take advantage of them. Hives with even moderate numbers of varroa in the autumn have hugely reduced honey gathering potential.
Many years ago I ran some trials using various thymol products. I had some untreated control hives that looked exactly the same as the other hives, with just a few more mites than them, but they produced zero honey that autumn compared to 25 kg extra from the hives with no mites. Things have only got worse since then.
Shifting
We used to do a lot of shifting out from the mountains in winter, and back again in late spring, with pollination in between. Sometimes, because of drought or excessive rain, we would get the urge to shift bees during the season. One year, because of drought, we took off the one box of honey the hives had and got them ready to shift up into the mountains. Before we could shift them it rained, so we didn’t and they went on to produce another 80kg a hive, whereas where we were going to shift them to produce nothing.
In over 50 years as a commercial beekeeper I have only once moved hives during the season and won on the deal. That year there was almost no flower on the mānuka and continual rain in the hills, so after Christmas we moved a lot of hives back from the mountains into their dry winter sites where we never left more than a few hives. It was a good move and they produced a moderate crop as opposed to zero for the hives that we didn’t shift.
Most of the time it is easier and more profitable, or at least less loss-making, to do nothing. Keep good records on production and over the years you will see if an area is profitable.
You won’t get it right every time. I certainly don’t. I still make mistakes, but believe me, it is a wonderful feeling when you drive into an apiary and every single hive is full.
** A Little Something Extra **
Editor: John has kept detailed notes of his apiaries over decades (some dating back to the 1960s!), including their honey production. This image is from one apiary and features yield data from the 1993-94 season up until summer 2021-22, which he wishes to share to show how things have changed over the years.
The site is on a Hawke’s Bay farm in continuous ownership of the same family for the length of John’s apiary being there, which he explains “I started working these hives in 1972 and my brother and I brought them in 1995. I have been running them on my own since 2015”.
“One thing you do need to remember is that all these averages include honey that was left on in the autumn for the winter and on average that would be about 10kg/hive (all hives were left 15kg but some of that is sugar). They do not include how much is fed in the spring. Average per hive includes all hives, including any that died during the season.”
Note the long-term average honey production in excess of 80kg/hive … and that summer of 2015/16…
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