At Assembly Park, we recently celebrated a significant milestone in our beekeeping journey – the honey harvest!
With support from our friends at Alvéole, their dedicated team embarked on a mission to collect the golden nectar from our Assembly Park hives, ensuring it was a stress-free experience for our hardworking bees. The Alvéole team takes immense pride in their approach, which revolves around gentleness, precision, and the well-being of our buzzing friends.
Harvesting honey is an art, and Alvéole takes every step to ensure that it’s a swift and gentle process for the bees. Using specialized tools like a delicate “bee brush” made with soft and silky bristles, they carefully remove honey frames from the upper boxes. The bees are gently brushed off the frames near the hive entrance, and the frames are swiftly placed in a closed box to keep them safe. Harvesting honey can be quite a workout, especially when each frame can weigh up to 10 pounds!
Their commitment doesn’t end with harvesting the liquid gold. During the same visit, they also treated the colony for varroa, a parasitic mite that can be harmful to honey bees. The team times this treatment to ensure there is no contamination of our honey, guaranteeing that it remains pure and natural.
After this incredible journey, our honey will make its way to the Alvéole honey house in Montreal. Here, they painstakingly uncap each frame by hand and spin them in their centrifugal extractor. The honey is then filtered through a mesh sieve to remove any wax particles. Stay tuned for more on our honey’s journey from hive to jar!
