Wie unser Honig entsteht in Englisch
Honey Farm Dieter Weinkauf & Karin Wolter
Gladbacher Straße 93 – 40219 Düsseldorf
Tel.: +49/211 - 99 45 93 78 – Mobile: +49/171 - 18 69 002
info@honig-duesseldorf.de – www.honig-duesseldorf.de
How Our Honey is Produced
Our colonies of bees are located in Düsseldorf-Stockum Lohauser Deich, Düsseldorf-Hamm and the Rheinbogen Düsseldorf-Itter on the Rhine (both a conservation and ground water protection area). There our bees collect pollen and nectar: in spring, among others, from hazel-bushes, goat willows, cherry and maple trees, blackthorn, dandelions and comfrey, and from early summer onwards from black locust trees, lime trees, raspberries and blackberries. No wild herbs in bloom are left unvisited.
In accordance with modern standards we keep our bees in Langstroth hives (“Hohenheimer – Zander Beuten” after Dr Liebig), which we paint with linseed oil. Our bees live in moveable comb hives made of residue-free wax within small wooden frames.
Queen excluders help us keep the queen and drones inside the two-chamber brood-boxes of each hive so that the honey supers remain free of brood. This guarantees a stress-free maintenance of our colonies of bees throughout the year; stress-free both for them and for us. We only ever harvest honey from newly built combs. Honey stored in the brood-boxes remains there as a natural food storage for our bees.
We harvest honey twice a year when the swarming sets in. Late summer is the time for beehive hygiene. As the lower brood-chambers are now empty, we remove them, melt their old combs and replace them with the previously upper chambers. The emptied brood-boxes are re-installed on top of them. By means of this procedure one third of our honeycombs are renewed every year in order to prevent diseases within the different hives.
We thoroughly monitor the development of Varroa mites, introduced from Asia and now prevalent in all bee colonies around the world including ours, through regular analyses of our bee colonies (“Gemülldiagnose”). Varroa mites are a threat especially to winter bees. After the honey harvest of late summer and autumn we treat our colonies with a proven mixture of lactic acid, formic acid and oxalic acid. Spring and summer drone brood combs are used as traps for Varroa mites.
Infestation with Varroa mites thus is kept beneath the threshold level of damage in all our summer, autumn and winter colonies and no traces of it enter our produce.
We only prepare those colonies which are healthy and strong enough and equipped with enough provisions for winter. For us this is the key to a healthy development of our bee colonies, to making the best-possible use of the abundant opportunities of pollen and nectar collection that our area offers, and, ultimately, to honey of the highest quality itself.
We make our delicious “Lecker Honig aus Düsseldorf”, harvested from our beehives, ourselves; we extract it and pour it into jars by hand, one by one. From the honey harvest at the very beginning to the moment we close the lid on our honey jars ready for sale we dedicate ourselves to bringing to you only the highest-quality Düsseldorf honey.
We keep our bees in accordance with guidelines and regulations issued by Dr Pia Aumeier and Dr Gerhard Liebig (www.immelieb.de).