What's the Buzz around Woodland Creek honey farm??

DECEMBER 2024

Right now, all our colonies are in “winter mode” and generally are very quiet and not leaving the hive, except for those occasional cleansing flights on dry, slightly warmer days-bees don’t fly in the rain. Instead, they are clustered into a ball of bees, that is keeping the inner temperature of the hive in the low to mid-nineties by consuming the honey and pollen they have worked hard for during the foraging season and undulating their muscles to generate heat. They are not exactly dormant or hibernating, but they are very slowed down.

The queen who ordinarily is laying between 1500-3000 eggs a day, stopped laying in late fall in preparation for winter. Less eggs means less new bees, and less new bees is more food for the rest of the colony to survive on.

In the late winter or early spring, here in South Puget Sound, the Alder trees come into bloom making pollen available for new bees. Around that time, the queens will begin laying eggs again and the colony will experience explosive growth into the spring so they have a large enough workforce to make the honey they will need for next winter.

That’s one reason why we leave between forty and sixty pounds of honey with each colony when we harvest, so they have plenty to last the winter and early spring.

For the rest of us who work the 4 apiaries that make up the farm, “winter mode” is a bit of a slowdown, but it’s anything but not busy.

We are checking in on our colonies to make sure they don’t run out of resources. We are doing maintenance, repairing, replacing and building new equipment. We are also making plans to meet our goals for the new season.

In 2025, we are planning to harvest more honey. We are grateful for our customer base which has created more demand for local honey. THANK YOU!

This year we are also looking forward to expanding our honeycomb and pollen production significantly. If you’ve not tried either, you should! We think honeycomb is the sweetest thing you’ll ever eat, and pollen is a natural energy source that also helps build resistance to allergies and strengthens the immune system.

This year we will also have a dedicated “mobile apiary” of colonies. Depending on the nectar flow, we will move these hives to various locations to be helping with blueberry, tree and sunflower pollination at a few local farms.

We are also continuing our commitment to helping provide clean drinking water to impoverished people who do not have access to it. We do this by giving 40% of all our sales to Living Water International. When you buy any of our products; honey, chunk honey, honeycomb, pollen, or lip balm, nearly half of what you spend goes to help out those in need. THANK YOU!