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Antonia Siebert has been working near full time on Honey Harvest Preparations for the past two weeks.  Work has included vendor coordination, advertising and outreach, coordination with the Great Falls Philharmonic and our musical guests, getting volunteers lined up for set up and day of chores, and many other things.  Her dedication to ensuring the event has been amazing.  While Antonia ha been coordinating and managing the festival planning, We have focused on getting our products of the hive ready.  Tasks we have completed include labeling our bottled honey, making 100 beeswax candles, and 75 containers of lip balm.  We have revamped the honey booth for this year, updating our display and signage.

We are proud of the awards we received at the Fairfax 4-H Fair this year. 

Meteorological spring ended June 1^st and temperatures have begun to regularly touch the 90s.  With the change in seasons comes the end of the main nectar flow in Northern Virginia.  In the apiaries, we are seeing the field bees bringing back white clover, “ditch” lily (Hemerocallis fulva) and Tree of Heaven (Ailanthus altissima) pollen in abundance.  Soon, these nectar and pollen sources will taper off, and our colonies will begin to experience a period when they are unable to gather enough nectar and pollen to meet their needs.  This time, which will run until we see cooler weather in September is known as the dearth.  During the dearth, our bees will reduce their population to conserve resources, and forage greater distances in search of nectar and pollen.  The strong impulse our colonies had to reproduce by swarming will largely stop because of the lack of forage this month.

June is a good month for harvesting honey.  A June harvest gives us plenty of time to let our honey settle out small wax bits that remain after the extracting process, and for us to package our crop in time for our annual Honey Harvest Festival.  We will again be entering our honey in judged competitions which usually occur in August.

Towards the end of the month, we will begin to feed our colonies a light sugar syrup to ensure that they have sufficient resources to survive the winter, and to reduce colony stress during the dearth.  We will also measure varroa mite levels and treat our bees based on the results.  Lastly, we will start making some more new queens this month, to ensure all our colonies have strong queens going into the fall.

The coming week is expected to be unseasonably warm. This follows what has generally been a warmer than average spring. This means that lots of plants are in bloom. We are seeing the bees work Star Magnolia, Elm, Lesser Celandine, Hairy Bittercress, Dandelion, Silver and Red Maple and Russian Olive all in bloom. Our colonies are strong and and will need to be pulled back by removing some bees, or otherwise split in the next two weeks. We are planning to make up to 10 5-frame mating colonies to raise 20 to 30 new queens this year. This will allow us to have new queens in all our existing hives, create some new colonies to replace our winter losses, and to have a few extra colonies either for sale or to over winter for 2027.

To accommodate the 5 frame mating colonies, we will be setting up a third yard, off of Seneca Road. We are grateful Brad and his family for granting us use of a small portion of their beautiful 5 acre property. We continue to be grateful to Milt and Helen for their support of the CTK bee ministry and for allowing us to manage quite a few more colonies on their beautiful property off of Walker Road than we initially agreed to place there.

None of this ministry would be possible without our cheerful and hardworking Apiary volunteers. Josh has been a steady volunteer since the very beginning. Louise, Li, Kevin, and Melody are hardworking and eager even during the punishing heat of August. When it comes harvest time, we receive tremendous support with the extraction and bottling from the congregation.

Merry Christmas from Christ the King Church Apiaries! Christmas day was in the mid 50’s and gave us a chance to work off a few holiday cookies by checking in on the bees. We are pleased to report that all the colonies are doing well and that they all had enough honey and pollen for the near future. We will continue to monitor each colony to ensure that they have plenty of food to make it through the winter. Curiously, our bees will need more food starting in January as the queen resumes laying eggs and the colony raises the new brood. They will also need more food if the weather returns to being unseasonably warm like it was before the December cold snap. Why? When the bees are out foraging and taking cleansing flights (yes, this is what it sounds like), they expend more energy than when they are clustered in the hive. Since we took some of their honey for our use, we are careful to make certain that they have enough remaining to make it through until spring.

How cold is too cold for our bees? It depends. An individual bee will succumb to hypothermia in temperatures below 45F. Together, a colony will cluster together in the hive and flex their flight muscles to stay warm. In this configuration, a colony can survive in temperatures down to -40F or less. Their challenge then becomes being able to move the cluster around to get enough food. As it gets colder, bee’s ability to move the cluster around to feed becomes increasingly limited. If it stays below 0F for a week, the bees will begin to struggle for food. Since it rarely gets this cold in Virginia (and has never been known to stay this cold for a week) we usually don’t worry about the cold, except when our colonies are very small.

This year, Christ the King Apiary is a proud winner of three awards at the Arlington County Fair. We won 1st place for our Ross Round entry in the comb honey category, 2nd place for our “Black Jar” (rated on taste alone) entry, and 3rd place for our Extracted Honey entry. May thanks to all those people who volunteered to look after the bees, extract and bottle our honey. All your hard work has been rewarded!