A couple of the GFC owners are chatting to our mutual suppliers and asking some indepth questions about their products and how they conduct business. Here is some new info from Debbie of My Dad’s Honey:
Graham has 1600 hives which are moved from site to site where there is food for the bees.e.g. when gums flowering, then Fynbos and Canola. He puts them on farmers lands (with their permission) in Somerset West, Caledon, Franschoek, the Walker Bay Conservatory and in between.
We have 6 full time employees. Two do hives; two process the honey and bottle; and one makes hives. I do all the sales and marketing. We have a bee room on a small holding in Sir Lowrys Pass Road and sell it from our home in Somerset West. My Dads Honey is divided into 2 companies, one for the honey processing and sales and one for pollination and general management.
We do not supplement the bees at all and rely on the natural foraging for our bees which is why Graham moves them all the time to where there is food and water.
When the bees are on the Canola, the hives are moved when there is spraying. The Canola crop is used to catch bee swarms for pollination and the honey produced is our delicious creamed honey. This is creamed because it crystallizes very quickly and I beat it in the mixer to break down the crystals and make it spreadable.
I later asked Debbie about residual pesticides on the canola and she said the following: we have no idea where the bees forage and they seem healthy and strong. Moving them away for the spraying is the best the farmers can do.
All My Dads Honey is pure, raw, untreated and unheated. Graham harvests the honey in supers, which fit onto the top of the hives. These are brought back to the Bee Room where they are out into a centrifugal drum which spins slowly letting the honey drain out of the comb, through sieves into buckets. The comb is by then thoroughly dried and this is processed into wax for strips to start new hives. We do keep some for our combed honey sold in 300gm jars. It is then transferred into another stainless steel drum and heated to the temperature of the hive and sieved again. Out of a tap on the bottom the honey is poured into bottles or buckets, washed, labelled and transferred to our home from where it is sold.
This is a very labour intensive industry and as the distances are great, Graham does about 300km per day x 5 days week.
As each bee only makes 1/2 teaspoon of honey in its lifetime – imagine how many bees we need?