A beekeeper from Black Mountain Honey removes dangerous trees after three massive ones crushed thousands of pounds of hives last year. He chips the brush, salvages logs for fuel, and advises other beekeepers to either move hives away from dense woodland or fell hazardous trees before winter.
Last year in this forest apiary, 3 huge trees came down and they crushed lots of beehives, causing thousands of pounds of damage. This year I'm making sure it doesn't happen again. So the forest apiary site that I've got is absolutely wonderful. It is in the middle of the densest, thickest forest you can possibly imagine, way out of the way of anybody and perfect for the bees. Lots of really good forage for the bees here. And this was my original Black Mountain Honey site, But you know, the trees came down and they crushed a lot of beehives. And it was so lucky last year that there wasn't any beehives actually up here. They were doing a huge amount of forestry work, clearing things through. And what happens when you start clearing trees in big forests is that you get a wind pocket come in like that and then further trees come down. These trees were absolutely ginormous, like 2, 3 feet in diameter, some of them. So you don't want beehives underneath them. But this year I promised myself and I promised the bees behind me that I wouldn't let the same thing happen now that I've actually got bees up here again. So the landowner very kindly allowed me to get some forestry guys in to chop down the trees to make sure that the spot that they're in here is very well protected. Now we've not just been randomly chopping down trees, we've only been taking down the ones that are at risk of falling or the ones that have kind of snapped off. So basically the partially wind-damaged ones already. But what we've been doing here today in the absolute blitzing down rain, like you have never seen rain like it rained today. You wouldn't. You wouldn't think it now, would you? It's a beautiful sunny day, about four o'clock in the afternoon. But what we did today is we chopped down all of those trees. Got a big brush pile behind me there. That's going to be put through the chipper. And then if I swing around this way here, you will see a mega mega pile of logs that the forestry guys are going to come back. They're going to split all of that down, stack it up, store it, and then it's going to be used as wood fuel. So nothing goes to waste. But I thought I would just do a little video, kind of giving you a heads up. Shout out to people if. You are in woodland or you are close to trees, it's September now. Either move your bees out from underneath the trees, or if you can fell some of the trees around it, make sure you do it early in order to give your bees the best chance of not being crushed through winter. I've had thousands of pounds worth of beehives crushed. I've had a number of colonies of bees crushed as well in previous years. I'm moving all of my bees out away from dense woodland, but in this apiary here, because it's so perfect, I'm taking the trees out and I'm keeping the spot. So massive thank you to the Forestry team. My bees are once again safe in the Black Mountain Honey Forest Apiary, and I can't wait to get these bees through the winter and into spring 2025.
