The extracting is done, the jars are filling up, and I've finally had a chance to sit down and think about what this year's harvest actually tells me. No two years are ever the same in beekeeping, and 2026 has been no exception.
This year started slower than I'd have liked. A cool, wet spring meant the bees were later than usual getting out to forage, and I genuinely wondered whether we'd see much of a crop at all. But once the weather turned in early summer, the colonies made up for lost time. The oil seed rape and bramble flow in June was one of the strongest I've seen, and by July the supers were heavier than I expected.
A few things stood out to me this year:
Strong colonies really do out-forage weak ones by a huge margin. The difference in yield between my strongest and weakest hives this year was stark, which has reminded me how much of beekeeping success comes down to spring colony build-up rather than anything you do in summer itself.
Timing the extraction matters. I left one super on a touch too long and the honey had started to granulate slightly at the edges before I got it off. Lesson learned for next year.
Every jar really does taste a little different. Because the bees forage on whatever is flowering nearby, the honey from the hives closer to the farmland has a noticeably different flavour to the honey from the hives nearer the gardens and hedgerows. It's one of my favourite things about local honey; it's never quite the same jar twice.
I'm genuinely grateful every year for the chance to do this. Keeping bees is hard work, some weeks feel like one long list of jobs, but pulling a full frame of capped honey out of the hive never stops feeling like a small miracle. Thank you, as ever, for buying local and supporting the bees.
Happy beekeeping from Penshurst Bees!