Shadow's Bees

22/10/2025

NO HARVEST IN 2025.

I know a number of people have asked to be on the waitlist for my honey harvest this year. Unfortunately, due to a move to our new home in June (which was in no small part to give us room to expand our apiary), other home-related work got in the way of my normal beekeeping activities. While I could likely get a small harvest from one of my hives, I have decided to let them keep the excess honey through the winter, and I'll harvest next year once things have settled down.

On the plus side, I seem to be going into winter with 6 active, healthy colonies, so I have hopes for my honey harvest next year. And I am also building four more hives over the fall and winter, to allow for further expansion. I hope to have more steady, and larger, harvests from 2026 forward.

11/07/2025

🍯 FILTERED OR UNFILTERED? 🐝 Tell Us What You Prefer!

I don't know how big our harvest will be this fall, but it's clear there will be one, and I want your input!

At Shadow’s Bees, we use natural beekeeping practices — no chemicals, no sugar feeding, no queen excluders, and no drone culling. We harvest our honey using the traditional crush-and-strain method, never a centrifuge.

Now the question is:
Would you prefer this season’s honey to be…

🧼 Filtered Honey – smooth, clear, and golden
✔ Finely strained to remove most pollen and particles
✔ Slower to crystallize
✔ Milder in flavour
✔ Great for a clean, shelf-stable option

OR

🌿 Unfiltered Honey – rich, cloudy, and natural
✔ Lightly strained to keep the pollen, propolis, and enzymes
✔ May crystallize faster
✔ Deeper, more complex flavour
✔ Ideal for raw honey lovers who want the good stuff left in!

💬 Let us know in the comments:
Do you prefer FILTERED or UNFILTERED honey — and why?
Your feedback helps shape this year’s batch!

01/07/2025

The new apiary has been set up for a couple of weeks now.

16/06/2025

My active hives have now been moved to our new location. Unfortunately, it looks like one of the hives I thought was active was actually just being robbed of resources by the other colonies, so I only had two active (and very strong) colonies in my original bee yard. But all four are now installed in the new apiary; the two empty ones will either attract a swarm or serve as extra boxes for the other hives.

Of course, I completely forgot to take a picture of my new expanded apiary, but I'll share some pictures/video in time as they settle in.

15/06/2025

The expansion of our beekeeping operation at the new location has started. Today, I took delivery of four new nucleus colonies (nucs) and set them up on the property. Tomorrow morning, we’re moving our existing colonies, which should be an adventure.

At that point, we’ll have seven active colonies and an empty hive that hopefully picks up a swarm sometime this month.

I’ll also spend this fall building new hives of a different type. They’re called Lazutin hives, and I’ll share more information on those as work progresses; the plan is to add four of those to the apiary next year and then see if the bees do better in the existing Warré hives or the new Lazutin hives.

14/04/2025

It looks like I may have been a little premature in my assessment. After getting home from work today, I visited my colonies to see if there was any sign of life in colony #4, with a plan to open the hive and take off a box of honey in preparation for harvesting. However, when I got there, I actually saw enough activity to indicate the colony may have survived after all. If so, this is great news; I won't be able to harvest any honey right now after all, if all my colonies actually did survive the winter, but it means the fall harvest should be that much bigger. I'll now have to wait at least another couple of weeks to get a string of warm days together to make a final determination on the status of each colony, but I'm more hopeful about a full survival rate than I had been up to now. 👍

And as if to say, "Go away and let us get to work here," a honeybee landed on my face while I was checking on another of the colonies and stung me between my nose and my upper lip. I'll have a nice puffy face in the office tomorrow!

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14/04/2025

It was a beautiful spring day today, so I took the opportunity to check in on the bees. It looks like my initial impression was correct; one colony is going strong and bringing pollen into the hive meaning the queen is already laying eggs, two other colonies look like they’ve made it through the winter as well, if not quite as well as the first one, and one colony likely did not survive. On the plus side, I’ll likely harvest the honey next week from the colony that didn’t make it, so I should have some to offer up. Of course, I won’t know for sure until I crack open the hive.

On another note, I didn’t think I would be able to expand our operation due to thee upcoming move to our new home. But with a move now confirmed for mid-June, it’s not too late to expand, and I have placed an order for four more nucleus colonies (or “nucs”). So if things go according to plan, I may be entering the winter with as many as seven active hives!

I’ll provide an update once I know how much honey I’ll be able to harvest next week. In the meantime, please let me know if you want to reserve honey; as before, I will be offering both 1kg and 500g bottles for sale. First come, first served!

15/03/2025

With a couple of spring-like days finally upon us, it's time to check in on our bees to see if they made it through the winter. And based on activity, the results are good! Three hives have definitely survived the winter and the bees are actively cleaning out their homes to get ready for the new season. The fourth one is a little less clear; it doesn't have anything near the same activity as the others, but I did see a couple of bees coming out and heading back in. So this one's a "possible" at this time; I'll know more once the weather gets even warmer.

While I'm happy our bees have made it through the winter, it does make the move to our new home a little more adventurous. Unlike commercial beehives, our natural hives don't use plastic foundation; the bees build their own honeycomb off the top bars we hang at the top of each box. This makes the honeycomb less rigid, and the Warré hives we use are not meant to be moved.

Add to that the fact that by mid-June when we move, the bees will have been gathering nectar and pollen for at least a couple of months, and each hive is probably going to weigh close to one hundred pounds. Should be fun!