We are sorry. Woodrow's Apiary currently does not sell
honey to the public.
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Beekeeping Information
Home Beekeeping Service
“I like pulling on a baggy bee suit, forgetting myself and getting as close to the bees' lives as they will let me, remembering in the process that there is more to life than the merely human.”
Sue Hubbell
A Book of Bees: And How to Keep Them
Woodrow’s Apiary offers home honey bee hive services. From hive installation to bottling honey produced by your very own honey bees, we will be there every step along the way.
The process all starts with an initial site visit. We will determine if your property is suitable for a hive and then find the best place on your property to place the hive. We will be looking for an area facing South or East so the hive can receive the most sunlight as well as an area where the bees will have an unobstructed flight path to and from their hive. Once we have established the site for the hive, the journey begins.
We will set up a completely assembled Langstroth style Honey Bee Hive. This familiar style hive has removable wooden frames with a wax foundation on which the queen will lay her eggs and the bees will make honey and store pollen. You may opt for an unpainted hive, painted hive or custom hive painted by a local artist. After the hive has been placed and properly oriented, we will introduce the honey bees to their new home. You will receive a package of honey bees containing three pounds of bees, or approximately 10,000 bees, and a queen bee. At this time we will feed them sugar syrup to supplement their foraging. The ample food will help develop the colony’s strength so they may begin to draw out the wax honeycomb for the queen to lay her eggs. The sooner the honeycomb is ready for the queen the sooner she will start laying eggs. She will lay around 1,500 eggs per day and the colony will start to grow.
As the weeks go by we will make visits to check on the health of the hive and take any necessary measures to try to control any problems that may arise including mites, disease, inadequate food supply, and swarming. We may medicate the colony, supplement their food supply with sugar syrup, or split the hive as needed. Despite our proactive approach to beekeeping, there is always a possibility that a particular colony of bees will die due to circumstances within nature that are beyond our control. Should you lose your hive to acts of nature we will do our best to get a new package of bees in a timely manner to repopulate your hive.
A healthy hive will produce honey. As the bees begin to fill up the hive with honey we will add additional honey supers for the bees to store the excess honey they produce. This excess honey is what we will harvest for you to enjoy.
When the time is right we will remove the honey supers from the hive, extract the honey from the frames, and bottle it for your enjoyment. We do not remove any honey from the bottom two brood boxes since this is the honey that the bees live off of. On average an active hive will produce anywhere from 10-50 pounds of honey each season. However, there is no guarantee how much honey the bees will produce or how much we will actually be able to harvest since honey production is directly related to the availability of pollen and nectar. Working to leave enough honey in the hives for the bees to survive on throughout the long New England winter will be a priority.
We welcome the opportunity to educate our clients on their honeybees. We want them to feel comfortable around their hives and ultimately be able to work their bees themselves in order to fully enjoy and learn about these amazing insects and the intricate interactions that go on within the hive.
