Beekeeping
Turnkey Service
Free Range Beehives handles all parts of of the beehive installation and maintenance, ensuring that your company is safe and that the bees are healthy.
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A single FRB system includes the installation and maintenance of three beehives with all the equipment necessary for the colonies to thrive. We utilize three colonies to ensure the health of the system as a whole, because the bees can share resources!
Maintenance
Once your beehive system has been installed, a qualified team of FRB beekeepers will come on a regular basis for routine checks and maintenance. These 'hive inspections' will generally occur once a week in the spring, and once every other week in the summer and fall. In order to properly manage a client's hives, we require access to the hive location during regular operating hours.
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During every hive inspection, we capture a wide range of data that help us determine the state of the honeybees and anything we saw that may be pertinent to the client. We then compile these notes and produce periodic reports that we send to each client. These inspection reports can be shared with all of a client's tenants, employees and community!
Honey Extraction
Honey collection and extraction are included as components of our annual subscription service. During the season, we will install "honey supers", which are additional, smaller hive boxes. The bees will fill these boxes with honey as the season progresses. Toward the end of each season, we will check honey stores and assess how much honey we can extract for our clients, and how much we need to leave for the bees. The bees rely solely on the honey they produce to survive the winter, so we only extract as much as the bees can spare without jeopardizing the health of the hive.
In the first year, the bees will only have enough of a population to make honey for themselves, but you can expect a full extraction in year two, with up to 30 pounds of honey per hive, which means 90 pounds per system! While the health and safety of the bees come first for us at FRB, we guarantee that we will do everything possible to maximize honey production and provide you with a honey crop in the fall.​​
