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The April Honey Flow

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In Southern California, we usually receive our strongest flow of incoming honey during the month of April.  Winter rains bring early spring flowers, followed, of course, by nectar for the bees.  During early April, a fine assortment of honey producing flowers blossom – the most impressive of which include avocado, citrus, eucalyptus, and sage.  Before a beekeeper knows it, honey supers have begun to fill, and more space is urgently needed.

For a queen producer, however, a strong honey flow can be a bit of a liability.  The mating nucs that a queen producer uses are not designed with honey production in mind, but rather for efficient queen production.  Their main features are that they are easy to set up, easy to work with, and easy to find queens.  They typically only contain a few small combs and practically no extra space for the bees to store surplus honey.

When the honey flow begins, the foragers within these mating nucs naturally grow as excited as any other foraging bees.  They cannot but help themselves, and spend every available minute collecting more high-quality honey than they have space with which to store it!  The result is a mating nuc with huge sticky combs and lots of gooey honey.

This slows things down somewhat for our queen harvesting crews, as we have to be extra careful when removing combs so that we do not squish the queen inside a mess of honey.  The good news is that these early season queens are most certainly well fed; basically they are honey connoisseurs, feasting on the best varieties of honey that Southern California has to offer!

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Mesquite Honey

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During late April and early May, long after many desert wildflowers have run their course, desert mesquite blooms.  Mesquite flowers form a long pod of yellow blossoms.  One of the most common desert mesquite trees is called the “honey mesquite.” (As a beekeeper, you know you are on the right track when a plant has the word “honey” in its title!)  Honey mesquite is found throughout the Southern United States, especially in the deserts of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

At Wildflower Meadows, we are fortunate to have several giant mesquite trees right along side our queen rearing apiary.  Because we are not exactly located in a desert, our mesquite trees bloom later in the season, usually in early June.  The mesquite nectar and pollen provide a timely boost to our summer queen rearing efforts.

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Mesquite honey is a light, mild-tasting honey, and very delicious.  This honey crystalizes more quickly than perhaps any other, at times seeming to crystalize virtually overnight.  This is why if you look for raw mesquite honey on the Internet, nearly all of the pictures show it in crystalized form.  Commercial beekeepers have to pay extra attention to not let mesquite honey cool when extracting it.  Mesquite honey has been known to actually crystalize during the middle of extracting, leaving the beekeeper with solid honey stuck inside the piping and tanks!  When it is in its liquid form – which is almost never – raw mesquite honey has a thick, almost chewy texture.