Our Bees are Italian Bees bred by Greg Mulder from MULDER APIARIES

Our bees are very calm when being handled, show good hygiene traits and seem pretty good at bringing in loads of excess nectar and pollen during the Spring, Summer and Autumn honey flows. They have been going quite good at maintaining their health through the seasons, and have remained quite active through the winter due to our moderate climate here on the Mid North Coast of NSW.

We run 9 frames of full-depth langstroth frames in 10-frame boxes in both our brood boxes and our Honey Supers, and keep most hives 3-high in summer (brood plus 2 honey supers) and 2 high in winter. This configuration seems to result in more space in the boxes to manipulate the frames, and better access around the frames for the bees allowing them to inspect and protect the frames from intruders better. Another result of this is extra wide frames of honey in the supers which are able to be uncapped easier, without affecting the overall storage capacity of each honey super.

Since starting our adventure by buying 80 Nuc’s, we have begun expanding our hive numbers by splitting existing hives to create new ones, and adding new queens to the new ones, usually in spring. We have found this very effective and had great success rates with this technique.  We operate small sites in a variety of areas, and generally have only  20 – 30 hives per apiary site ensuring all the bees get heaps of nutrition.