Photo collage with the highlights of the 2024 beekeeping year

At the beginning of 2024, we never would have thought we would have such an exciting beekeeping year… It was surprising, educational, frustrating at times, and ultimately more successful than we could have ever imagined 😇

Storm-Proofing

After finishing our old building renovation in January and February, we started preparations for the upcoming beekeeping season in March. Our first project was "storm-proofing." Until now, we had to worry about our bees during every summer thunderstorm and could barely sleep in the wind and weather. Although we always strapped down our hives in the summer to anchor them to their stands... we knew that in a strong enough storm, these stands would simply fall over along with the hives. Our new platforms were finished just in time before adding the first honey supers... and that was urgently needed, as our bee towers grew taller this year than ever before 😄

Assembling our platforms for our beehives

Photography & Video Production

Equipped with our new macro lens, we also repeatedly took time this year during our work at the apiary and in the garden to document our work.

Romi Netzberger doing macro photography of the bee brood

Honey

As already mentioned, our bees produced more honey this year than ever before in our beekeeping history. We expanded our honey selection from 2 to 6 varieties and started a new construction project to be able to process all the honey in the future... But let's start at the beginning 😉

Improved Harvesting Methods

Even the first honey harvest at the beginning of June was quite good. We had invested a lot of time beforehand to optimize our harvesting methods, because one of the biggest challenges in honey harvesting is to get the honey supers free of bees so as not to take them into the honey processing room. Our new "funnel method" allowed us to temporarily park the bees that remained in the honey supers on harvest day, despite the bee escape (a "one-way street" for the bees inserted the day before), in an empty hive so they wouldn't fly back to the harvested combs. We were completely convinced by this method and repeated it for the second harvest in July... which, however, presented us with a new challenge in the next step...

Matthias Amon preparing for the honey harvest at the apiary

Bees are gently brushed off the honey frames during the harvest

Close-up of a honeycomb with bees and capped honey

Melezitose Honey

First of all, during the second harvest, we were overwhelmed by the large amount of honey our bees had stored so late in the beekeeping season. After observing bees harvesting honeydew in the nearby forest, it was clear to us that we had a chance at forest honey, which is rather atypical for our region. The harvest went like clockwork thanks to our new harvesting method...

Car trailer full of harvested honey supers

But after the first extraction run, we had to realize that a large part of the stored honey had already crystallized and we could not easily get it out of the combs. After extensive research, we found out that there was a significant melezitose occurrence in large parts of Austria and Switzerland this year.

What is Melezitose? Melezitose is a natural type of sugar found mainly in honeydew, which is produced by certain aphid species and collected by bees. These aphid species appear in large numbers every few years. This leads to a higher proportion of melezitose in the honey in those years. The more melezitose the honey contains, the thicker the honey and the faster it crystallizes.

After a few setbacks, we finally found a way to carefully extract a large portion of the honey from the combs. Unfortunately, almost 200 kg of honey remained in the combs... We had to melt this honey down and used the resulting honey water as fertilizer for our plants.

During the honey harvest, the wax capping is carefully removed with a cappings fork

Despite all this, the harvest was one of the most successful we've ever had: In total, we harvested 850 kg of honey this year! 🤯🥳 And we still left each of our bee colonies enough honey in the brood chamber to overwinter on their own food.

Enough Honey for the Bees: Even though overwintering bees on their own honey has its risks, we believe it is unfair to take everything from the bees and feed them sugar water - which is common practice today. Besides sugar, honey contains many other nutrients that are very important for the health of the bees. Therefore, we leave our bees enough food for the winter and only feed them with our own honey in an emergency.

Creamed Honey

In all the previous years, our honey remained liquid for months and, if it crystallized at all, it was very weak. This year, the spring honey in our 40 kg storage containers was completely crystallized after just 2 months. The solution for fast-crystallizing honey types: processing it into creamed honey.

So we began to experiment. First on a small scale, then we eventually moved on to larger quantities. This resulted in our three stirred honey varieties: Creamed Blossom Honey, Creamed Forest Honey, and Coarse Crystalline - for everyone who loves a bit more bite and texture in their honey 😄.

Jars with Creamed Forest Honey in 3 different sizes

The Art of Stirring Creamed Honey: The art of stirring creamed honey is to catch the right moment for bottling 🍯 The honey should still be liquid enough to get it into the jars. It must not be stirred too much or too little, otherwise it will either become too hard in the jar or remain too liquid.

Website, Honey Labels & Vulkanrot

This year, besides the actual work at the apiary and in honey processing, another topic was in focus: the design of our website, new honey labels, and a new name for our beekeeping operation. Although this name had been floating in the back of our minds for some time, it was only in the summer of 2024 that we finally implemented it: Our beekeeping operation was named Vulkanrot (Volcano Red), after the color of our beehives! Once the name was set, we worked diligently on programming, drawing, and designing. Over the course of the year, our logo, our honey labels with hand-drawn illustrations for our 6 honey varieties, our website, and print materials like flyers and brochures were created. At the end of the year, we also launched on Instagram and Facebook 🚀.

Jars with 5 different honey varieties and our newly designed honey labels

Social media post announcing our new website

Honey Processing Room & Cold Storage

To be better prepared for the coming year, we started our next construction project right after the second honey harvest in July: We converted two unused rooms in the outbuilding into our new honey processing room and a separate cold storage. The plans for this had been around for a long time. Now we felt ready for a level up 😄 So, in the following months, we demolished, chiseled, drilled, concreted, plastered, tiled, and installed. At the end of the year, we stood in our almost finished new workspace, already dreaming of our next honey harvest in spring 2025 🍯☺️

Our honey processing room before the renovation

In the future honey processing room, Matthias and his father are laying water pipes in the floor and wall

Romi Netzberger shovels sand into the concrete mixer

Matthias and his father install the stainless steel sink in the new honey processing room

A Very Big Thank You!

Many thanks to everyone who supported us in all our projects and work. Without you, our construction site and our investments this year would not have been possible. First and foremost, we would like to thank our family, who always stood by us with advice and practical help.

We are already looking forward to when it's buzzing and humming outside again next year and are excited to see what the bees and nature have in store for us 🍯☺️

Selfie of Romi Netzberger and Matthias Amon on their New Year's Eve hike

Our apiary in winter, covered with hoarfrost