How Much Honey Do Bees Produce - Spring Harvest Jolanta Colonies - How To Maximise Honey Production
In this episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping, Laurence Edwards of Black Mountain Honey showcases the spring honey harvest from his top‑performing Jelanta queen colony in North Wales. He walks through the hive’s configuration—a National brood box, queen excluder, a deep super and three shallow supers—removing frames to display capped honey, estimating the weight of each super (approximately 20‑25 lb, 15 lb, and 25 lb) and arriving at a total of about 60 lb of honey already collected by mid‑June. Edwards highlights the gentle temperament of the bees, the distinctive white cappings, and the role of the UK‑mated Jelanta queen genetics in achieving such yields, noting that the queens are now available for purchase on his website. He also explains beekeeping practices used, such as early‑year nuc splits, swarm prevention, and checkerboarding foundation to encourage even honey storage. The video concludes with a projection that the colony could reach roughly 160 lb of honey for the year, a comparison to typical yields, and a promotional call‑to‑action for viewers to buy the Jelanta queens.
Chapters
Today I'm going to show you my spring harvest from my best performing Gelanta queen. Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Today I'm going to show you how much honey one of my Gelanta queen colonies has harvested in the spring. Now we've just started stocking these queens on our website www.blackmountainhoney.co.uk, They're UK bred, not imported queens, 100% UK mated, and they are some of the best genetics that are available in the UK. So I put a post up on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram the other day, and I was overwhelmed with the response from people who are really interested in these queens. So I thought I would do a video. Really good time to do a video actually, because I'm taking a spring crop of some of my colonies, and in this apiary here, they're all Jelanta queens, and they have done So well. Even after a terrible, terrible May, they've pulled in a crazy amount of honey. So this is just a spring crop. This apiary is actually a summer apiary for us here. We've targeted the Himalayan balsam here and the bramble and the lime trees. That's why we're at this apiary in this location. But it turns out that the spring crop here is really, really good as well. So what I'm going to do in this video, I'm going to get my suit on, I'm going to go and open up the best performing colony in this apiary, and I'm going to show you from top to bottom I'm going to show you all the boxes. I'll have a little bit of a weigh of them as well, just by hand, to give you a rough estimate of what the spring crop is. But you will be able to see by the state of these boxes, A, that they're very heavy, and B, they are jam-packed full of honey. So I'll get my bee suit on, I'll get my smoker on. Let's go and see how much of a spring crop the Jolanta queens have brought in. So here we go. This is the colony in question, and as you can see, it's on quite a few boxes. Got a National 14 by 12 brood box, Single queen excluder, and then I've got a national deep as the first super, and then three national shallows. Now I haven't been here for a couple of weeks, so I'm not 100% sure as to how full all of these boxes are going to be. The last time I was here though, there was about two and a half of these boxes full. If I had to have a guess, I would say all four of these boxes are going to be pretty much full with honey now. I know certainly from moving them, trying to lift them, they're very, very heavy in. Indeed. Now this colony here has already had 2 nuc splits taken out of it early on in the year, and this just started off as a standard overwintered colony. So I've not combined any colonies to do this, isn't fabricated in any way. This is genuinely what these colonies are like— really nice, big, strong colonies, and they just time it to perfection to hit those flows. So I'll start off at the top. I'll take the roof off, I'll take the crown board off, the feeder, And I'm going to show you each box all the way down. I'm not going to go into the brood box. I just want to show you how much honey they've collected here, show you what a good job of collecting a real bumper crop of honey they do. Anybody can achieve this. I've not done anything special with this. There's no Demerara splits, there's nothing fancy. I'm not adding brood, I'm not increasing the number of bees. All I've done is I've stopped them swarming. They built up to this size on their own because that is part of their genetics. What's really nice about them as well, give you a lovely, beautiful white cappings wax as well, which you'll see in these images. Right, so let's get on with it then. I'm gonna take the roof off and we'll go straight in for the first super at the top. So there we go, this is the top box. You can see when you lift off a top box and it's 4 boxes high and there's bees all the way up to the top, you know you're in business. So I'm gonna pull a few of these frames out now. I'm not gonna go through every single frame. I'll pull maybe 2 or 3 frames out, Super. Super. I'll just show you how well they've packed in that honey, how well they've capped it, and then when I pick each box off, I'll give you a rough estimate of how much I think is in there. So here we go, here's a couple of frames. You'll see they've completely capped that over. They don't tend to cap the drone comb until the very end. I find that all the way through, they like to keep that until the end of the season, but everything else is really nicely capped. And you look at that lovely white cappings on there as well. Really nice white cappings, really nice gentle colonies. This is the top box and it weighs so much. These frames are jam-packed full of honey, really top quality Welsh honey. So you can see from these frames here that they are full, full to the brim. They've just not capped off the drone brood bit there at the moment. Do tend to wait until the end of the season to cap that off. I'm not sure why they do that, but you can feel that's really, really good weight. It's like that across all of the frames in the top box. So I'll put these frames back in, I'll get that top super off, I'll give it a little bit of a hand weigh, see how much I think it weighs, and then we'll move on to the next box. But also, just look at the temperament of these bees. Like, put your hand over the top of them like that. They're really, really nice gentle bees, these Jolanta ones. Very stable. They're very similar to all of the colonies here. I've got some really bad colonies here, you've seen them. Okay, it is nice weather today and the bees are busy, but you look at that, they're just not interested in me at all. Just want to make honey. They're doing a really good job of that. Right, that, that is a full super without a doubt. I know I'm lifting that up high. That has got to be at least 20-25 pounds in there, completely full. You can hear it's difficult to hold that. I'm going to put it up here, but that is a full box of honey. Serious exercise moving that honey. Right, so we've got 20-25 pounds up there, I reckon. Onto the next super now. And you can see they've braced that up as well, which means they're probably running out a bit of space even though they've got all of those boxes on. So I'll show you this box now, and then I'll show you a couple of frames from this box as well. Right, so next box down, very, very similar, completely full of bees. Quite a bit more brace comb on this one, but you'd expect that because you're in between 2 supers. Not going to bother cleaning that up just yet, but you can see really nice big strong colony, lots of frames full of honey. Let's get inside, see a couple of the frames. So there you go, not quite as advanced in this box, but still 50% capped on that one there, and then probably 60% capped on that one there. Again, really nice cappings, really big heavy frames full of honey. You can see what they're doing there, they are They're so busy, these bees. All they want to do is store that honey, and I think those frames look really, really nice indeed. So again, big heavy frames, not quite as heavy as the box above. They don't tend to store it all in a very similar fashion, so it's a bit scattergun, but these are really, really nice big heavy frames, not quite as heavy as that top box. I'll get this one off and I'll have a look at how much it weighs. Again, a really heavy box. Definitely not as heavy as that top box though, but it is, I'd say, 15 pounds easily in this one here. They're going to finish off capping that off, but that's a big heavy box of honey again. Lifting heavy boxes up high like that is really, really hard work. Right, we're on to the next box then. So this is the next box. This is a poly super, this one, and they've definitely not put as much in this poly super. So I'm going to take a look inside now and see See how many of the frames are actually full of stores. And the bees have just completely thrown me there because I'm looking down at that box and thinking that there's no bees really in this box, there's not going to be anywhere near as much honey, and this is the best box yet. And it's poly, read into that what you will, it's a sample size of one, but every single frame is completely capped over in here. And I'll just show you, I'm not cheating, showing you the best frames. Good frames, completely capped, beautiful white cappings. Show you a couple more. This is what we're talking about. This is what these Jelanta queens are capable of. We're on the 3rd super here and we're not even into the main flow yet. This is, this is just my spring crop, but it does continue. That was just a blip, that frame. You're looking at these frames of bees and they're so nice, they're so gentle, like it really doesn't come much better than that. I'm so impressed with these bees and that's why I feel genuinely honoured that I get to sell you these bees, because I do a bit of queen rearing, I like to dabble in it, but I'm really no expert. The people who rear these queens and send them to me, I just put them in the hive and this is the kind of honey crop that they produce for me. These are the frames, these are the gentle bees, and now I can sell those queens to you as well. I'll just show you the last couple of frames in this one because this really is a nice box. Like, you look at that honey all capped over, and that's where it butts up to the end of the box. I'm not expecting it to be perfect on both sides like that. Right, let's lift up this third box then and see how much this one weighs. Always difficult to judge when you're judging them on wood, they're super, super heavy, and then on poly. This one without a doubt is going to be the most honey in here because you can see it from the frames. Doesn't feel too much more in terms of weight, although you can really tell this is a heavy box. I'm going to say 25 pounds in this one as well, and I'll probably reevaluate that top one down to 20 pounds. So, so far we've got a 20-pound, a 15-pound, and a 25-pound. So I think we're sitting at about 60 pounds already for this colony, and we're not even in the middle of June yet. I'm just going to save my back and not try and put that one up too high because that would just be crazy. Right, so then we're on to the final box, and I wasn't sure whether there was going to be anything in this box, and, and there isn't really anything there. This is more of a bit of space for the bees just to put it just directly above that queen excluder. This was the last box that I put on. This was one to give them some space, so I can still see a fair bit of foundation in this one. I'll pull out a couple of frames and I'll show you where they've started to make a bit of work on it, but this one definitely isn't a super full of honey. It's a work in progress. So as you can see on this box here, a couple of frames of foundation in there still, and then they're starting to draw it all out really nice, storing that honey in there. Same with that frame there, drawing it out. And then as we move over there, we've got more and more honey going in. What I tend to do with colonies like this though is a bit of checkerboarding. Doesn't matter up in the supers, but put the ones of foundation in between the ones that are already drawn out. Just helps to draw it all out a little bit more even. And in terms of working out what the honey crop is, I'm just going to discount this box because I don't think there's much in it, maybe 5 pounds, but it's nowhere near ready to extract, so I won't even bother taking this box here off. Right, so I can stack everything back up. Like I said, I'm not going to show you in the brood box today, that's not what this is about. This colony here started off as an overwintered colony. It grew and expanded and expanded, and I took 2 2-frame splits out of there, so I've had 4 big frames of brood out of that brood box around the middle back end of April. Made some splits up with it as well. That queen has overcome that reduction and she has filled that brood box as well. I'm going to go through the brood box again today, but up until now, the middle of June, she's not swarmed yet, and that is what these bees have produced. So I think I'm on around 60 pounds of honey. This is North Wales we're talking about, this isn't the south coast of England. 60 pounds of honey and we've not even got past the June gap. So the spring flow is very much dwindling at the moment, but as soon as we get through it round here, this is when the fun begins. It's full of lime trees, full of Himalayan balsam, full of bramble. Like, this is a super, super apiary. I wouldn't be surprised if we got another 100 pounds of honey from this colony to take it up to around 160 pounds for the year. In North Wales, that's really, really good. A lot of my colonies that don't have these Jelanta queens in, I'll average around £50 per year. So £50 as a spring crop is really, really good. And look around you here, the rest of the colonies here, they're all there or thereabouts. I've not got some that have got £50 or £60 in and some that have got £5 or £10 in. Every colony in this apiary is packing in the honey, even though we've had a dismal May. I'm really pleased with this line of queens and I'm really happy that we can offer them to you now as well. So if you're interested in getting some of these queens, nice gentle bees that give you bumper crops of honey, that are used by the biggest bee farmer in the whole of the UK who manages— I got the number wrong before— in excess of 8,000 colonies. These are his bees and these are the bees that he's worked with for 30 or 40 years to produce this good bee, nice and gentle, that produces a bumper, bumper crop of honey. We can sell you them now, UK mated, so take a look on our website www.blackmountainhoney.co.uk and look for the Jelanta UK mated queens. So that's it for the video. I hope you enjoyed that one. What's better than taking a look through my spring crop? Like, I love it. I'm going to go through the rest of my colonies now, do my inspections up here, make sure none of them swarm. I'll probably take a little look at the honey along the way as well, just to think that Sometimes things do go right, but a lot of that is not down to me as a beekeeper. It's down to the genetics and the quality of bees that I'm given through Jolanta and through Murray McGregor. So I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you found it useful. As always, please hit the subscribe button. Please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time.
