Bee Management

Land Department staff manage honeybees for the Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux Community. We started in 2003 with five hives quickly learning the challenges of managing honeybees. We lost a number of our bees due to swarming. Swarming occurs when bees feel too crowded in the hive. They instinctively produce a new queen and roughly half of the younger bees take her to a new location. For us, that meant that we lost some workers that produce honey. At the end of the growing season, the bee numbers were replenished and our honey crop was still good.

We learned a lot from the 2003 season and corrected those mistakes for 2004. The weather, on the other hand, did not cooperate with us. The 2004 growing season was cool and wet. This reduced our honey crop because our bees did not forage as intensively as they would on warmer, more sunny days. We did manage to get 14 gallons of honey totaling 109 pounds from seven hives.

For the 2005 season, we expanded our hives to three times the size of last year’s project. We have four apiaries totaling 21 hives in our third year of managing honeybees. We hope to harvest a large crop of honey at the end of the growing season while preparing the bees to survive the Minnesota winter.