Beekeeper Hannah Sjostrom is working on an expansion plan for her family’s third-generation apiary in Maiden Rock, Wisconsin. Her family raises about 300 hives during the summer. In the winter, she sends them across the country to pollinate almonds. When the bees come back to Wisconsin, that’s when the expansion process starts.
“The last couple years has really been spent on making sure we have quality bees, so when we’re sending them out to California, when they come back, the goal is that the hives are going to be so big and healthy, we can split them in half,” she explains. “Our goal for this next year… is to take as many hives as we can and split it into two to three more hives.”
Her goal is to have up to 1,000 hives.
As the former Wisconsin Honey Queen and American Honey Queen, Sjostrom is familiar with answering questions about bees. And she certainly welcomes those questions as she tries to grow interest in beekeeping. Right now she gets a lot of questions about the drought, and how it’s impacting bees.
“Not having enough rain means that our bees can actually starve this time of the year when there’s nothing for them to eat on,” she says.
Sjostrom explains that she only removes excess honey from the hives to sell to consumers. If the bees are not making excess honey, or enough honey for the colony to eat, she supplements their feed with sugar water or corn syrup to keep them healthy.
What a bee forages on can change the flavor of the honey. Sjostrom sells both a standard clover honey — golden and sweet — and a buckwheat honey — dark and robust. Bees make buckwheat honey when they forage on the buckwheat flower. You may also find basswood honey. She says basswood honey tastes minty.
“If we have a specific type of honey that we’re trying to get, like the buckwheat for example, we will make sure that the boxes that we take for the honey — honey supers — that those are all empty when the buckwheat hits,” she explains. “That way, when they get the buckwheat, it will all go into those honey supers, and then when the buckwheat flower closes, we’ll get all those supers off then so it’s not tainted by anything else that’s there.”
Beekeepers also have to be mindful of pests, such as varroa mites and bear. Sjostrom treats her hives for varroa mites in the spring and fall when she’s not collecting honey. She compares a varroa mite to a tick for bees. Meanwhile, bears go after the bees — the protein — in the hive, so she keeps her bee yard fenced in.
In the meantime, Sjostrom stays engaged with beekeepers through the Wisconsin Honey Producers Association. You can also find her showcasing her honey at events such as Wisconsin Farm Technology Days. She says the best way to buy real Wisconsin honey is by going to your local honey producer. You can also look for the Something Special from Wisconsin label at the grocery store.
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