In my mind, the beekeeping season always runs from May to April, so while December is the end of the calendar year, it’s not the end of the natural flow of the beekeeping year. Or, at least, this is how I’m justifying posting yet another late season wrap-up!
This 2025 season was a challenge from the start. We had an incredibly rainy spring which kept the bees from getting out to collect nectar from flowers. June through July was rainy as well with round after round of bad storms in July. Then, it stopped raining which turned the late summer and early fall flows into barely a trickle. It can be difficult as a beekeeper to do the same thing every year and come up with a 1000 lb swing in honey production based solely on the weather, but I haven’t yet figured out how to control the weather (and clearly, neither have the bees).
The grand total for the year was 989 lbs of honey over 31 unique batches. In the photo above, they’re arranged like this:
Top row: Batches A-C
Second Row: Batches D-G
Third Row: H-M
Fourth Row: N-S
Fifth Row: T-Y
Bottom Row: Z-DD plus End of Season
You can see how the top two partial rows are spring honey where in previous years, it was a full 2 or 3 rows of the lighter spring honey. Our spring season was pretty well washed out by the rain, and it’s really obvious in that wall of honey photo. That said, even though there was less honey, the batches I did pull were some of the best honey I’ve ever gotten off those hives, and I’m super proud of those bees for producing such great honey despite the weather being against them all year.
In other statistics, my customers returned 393 jars which is a new record and I’m absolutely blown away. The impact is tremendous for me as a small business – it amounts to being able to skip an entire trip out to pick up new jars, saving both the carbon cost of the gas to get there and back as well as giving me back a few hours of time.
I’ve said it multiple times this year, but I’m so incredibly grateful to be a part of a community of small and local agriculture, farmers markets, makers, and all of you folks who support us. You make it possible to keep doing what I do, and I’m looking forward to another season!