I had a disastrous failure wintering my bees and I learned some hard lessons. Curtis Miedema of Miedema Honey Farms https://miedemahoney.com/ took the time to help me out and gave me a tour of his operation. To say it was inspiring does not do his family operation justice. The scale is incredible. When you look at a row of over 200 nucs on the edge of a field and realize each one of the nucs has 2 frames with 40 queen cells each and then multiply that by the multitude of similar sites Curtis points to as we drive by you start to get a feel for the size of the operation. To stand in a building with 35,000 full size honey super bee boxes really drives size that home.
There was so much to see including a really cool honey product. They take a pure organic honey and through a months long freezing cycle they naturally cream it. They make 2 variations, natural and cinnamon infused. Nothing is added to the honey except for the cinnamon in the infused honey. The honey is creamy and pourable at room temp and the taste is pure heaven!
A big thank you to Curtis for helping me out and we are happy to have bees buzzing again here on the Mellon Patch.