From 20 hives to 60 hives in a year – Matthew Ingram
Matthew Ingram of Holt Farm Apiaries gave a talk on moving from 20 to 60 hives within a year. This was the year when Matthew became a professional Bee Farmer.
Matthew, a regular in Bee Craft (a Beekeepers Magazine) gave a small verbal biography of what he has been doing for the past 6 years. Matthew started keeping bees by taking on just a couple of hives that happened to have been on his parents farm but had been abandoned many years ago and has now increased hive number to 600. He then spent time in Australia working for a commercial beekeeper and learning the ticks of the trade and the level of effort required.
Matthew who is hoping to produce 4 tonnes of Honey this year gave a talk which was informative and very entertaining. He gave us tips on making up nucs and how he produces up to 60 queens each week at this time of the year, through grafting. These queens are for his own hives and some he sells. He had some amazing pictures of his queen banks showing many queens being bought up in nucs. The queens were isolated from each other of course but marvelous to see. Especially for those doing Module 7.
Matthew also talked about record keeping and how he knows the status of a colony from bricks and the direction they were placed on the previous inspection, rather than having written records. He also writes notes on the hive itself which I imagine makes the hives look somewhat interesting. He does have detailed records on honey production and more detailed data on his queen rearing programmes. His records appear to be completely different from ours. We are hobbyists, with only a handful of hives compared to his hundreds. He just wouldn’t have the time and the ability to go through so many records.
He does mark every queen and seeing and finding the queen is an important aspect to his commercial beekeeping operation. He prefers to have a new queen in most hives every year, although he told us how he recently found a queen that was 3 years old. He wasn’t sure how she had managed to evade herself from being seen for that period.
The talk produced numerous questions from the audience at the end and that showed the interest people had in what Matthew was saying. Matthew who is from Tamworth, so local to Sutton Coldfield gave a marvellous talk. One that I feel most beekeepers would appreciate.
by Jitesh Patel