Did you know that we produce our very own Boringdon Honey from our very own Boringdon Bees?
Amidst our accident building and storied past, there exists a buzzing community of tiny but mighty inhabitants who play a crucial role.
Our resident beekeeper Ashley Tod gives us an insight into bee breeding, some key bee facts and the nurturing of our on-site bees during the changing seasons allowing our fluttering friends to thrive and produce the sweet, succulent honey that we use in many dishes at our enchanted place on the hill.
As a beekeeper, I has always strived to breed the best bees possible, productivity is of course important, but I also select for temperament and increasingly adaptation to the ever-changeable Devon weather. This is a process that takes time to bear fruit, and much as a gardener prunes an orchard, I am consistently selecting beneficial traits from his colonies to breed future generations of calm, locally adapted, and productive bees. Although this sounds harsh, I never wastes queens, but I do sideline them and prevent them from breeding. This means I have to keep detailed records of every visit to each hive, oddly this is one of my favourite things to do, I call it reading the bees. I treat every frame as if it were a page from a book, and follows the patterns and behaviours and interpret how the colony is doing, it’s a very mindful process and never gets boring as each hive is a new book to be read.
Boringdon bees have come from my Dartmoor stock and have been at Boringdon since late Spring 2023, the colonies were named by patrons as Lilabet, Flora, and Antheia. In a typical year, a colony of honeybees can be expected to produce between 20 to 30kg of honey over two harvests, one in Spring and the other in late Summer. Lilabet was the star performer last year with an outstanding spring crop of 35kg, Flora and Antheia didn’t produce a surplus in the Spring, therefore I decided to replace the queens in these hives with more productive ones. The Summer was very wet, and honeybees aren’t adapted to flying in the rain, so spent the month inside the hive consuming their honey to survive and stay warm in the poor weather.
Thankfully August brought warmer temperatures and sunnier days and the Boringdon ladies were able to replenish their honey stores in preparation for the coming Autumn. The queen can lay up to 1600 eggs in a single day, she knows however that from the Summer solstice, she must reduce this rate each day so that a smaller population of bees goes through the winter greatly increasing the colony’s chances of survival, how she does in the total darkness of the hive no one knows. At its Summer peak, each hive can grow to a population of 60,000 bees, and at its smallest during Winter 15-20,000 bees.
Each colony consists of three castes of bee, these being the Queen, female workers, and the male drones. A strong healthy queen can live for up to 5 years, workers which make up most of the colony and can live for up to 45 days in summer and 200 days if born during the Autumn. Drones are only ever produced if the colony has sufficient resources to feed and care for them, the Queen can choose the gender of each egg she lays, and only starts producing drones in the spring when there’s a good chance of virgin queens emerging from other colonies, alas the instant they mate they die. For those drones lucky/unlucky enough to make it to Autumn without mating, the workers unceremoniously boot them out of the hive as they’re no longer needed and are surplus to requirement, the colony is a ruthlessly efficient matriarchy.
During December the queen in each hive will have a few days where she stops laying eggs altogether, but on average she’ll lay eggs for 360 days a year. I traditionally visit each hive on Christmas day and give them a block of baker’s fondant each, I also talk to the hive, each queen can recognise, so it can’t hurt to keep them in the loop about the wider world! Believe it or not as soon as the Winter solstice has passed the queen detects the change in season and starts to ramp up her egg-laying for the coming year.
Boringdon Honey is available for purchase at Reception during your next visit.
