Sustainable honey harvest
In spite of this summer’s weather – it’s becoming an ongoing theme! – Gabi has been harvesting honey this week.
At Rails farm, we have two hives producing honey from the flowers on our small holding and the surrounding fields and gardens. Bees can fly up to three miles to forage, so if you live in the area, you may well have been visited by our bees.
As beekeepers, we are in a relationship of give and take with the bees. We give them with a suitable home and make sure that they’re healthy. At the end of the summer, we take some of their honey as payment, leaving them enough to survive over the winter when there is little food for them to find. We make sure that we treat our bees with the same high ethical standards as all our other livestock.
Extracting the honey does not harm or stress the bees. The frames are carefully removed from the hive and placed in an extractor, which spins them rapidly, flinging the honey out of the cells to run down the walls of the extractor, where it is caught, filtered and put into jars.
So, we now have a harvest of delicious, local honey which we sell to our friends and customers. Come and find us at Tuesday’s country market in Sturminster, check out our produce page or even buy a jar while coming for a lesson with our tutors!