Our First Harvest: 18kg of Summer Honey from Svinninge
The extraction room smelled like clover and linden blossom. After months of waiting, we finally spun our first harvest — and the colour was extraordinary.
The room that smells of summer
If you have never stood in a room while honey is being extracted, it is hard to describe. Warm wax, white clover, a top note of linden blossom — the whole Svinninge summer distilled into one small space. After our first full season, we finally spun our first harvest, and I am not ashamed to say we stood there grinning like children.
Eighteen kilograms, and a colour we did not expect
We had hoped for a modest first crop. What came off the frames was 18 kilograms of light amber honey, almost luminous when you hold the jar to the window. That colour comes from the white clover and the linden (lind) avenues that surround the apiary — a delicate, floral honey rather than a dark, robust one. Every site tastes of its own meadow, and now we know exactly what ours tastes like.
How we did it
- We took only fully capped frames — capped honey is ripe and low enough in moisture to store without fermenting.
- We left ample stores on the brood nest. The surplus is ours; the colony's own larder is not.
- We cold-spun and coarse-strained only — no heating, no fine filtering — so the pollen, enzymes and aroma stay in the jar where they belong.
Restraint is part of the craft
The temptation with a first harvest is to take everything. We didn't. A colony that goes into autumn light on stores is a colony you spend all winter worrying about — and feeding back most of what you took. Taking only the genuine surplus is not just kinder; it is better beekeeping.
A first harvest is a milestone you only get once. Eighteen kilograms is not a business. But it is proof that a patch of Swedish meadow, a few boxes of bees and a year of attention can turn sunlight and clover into something you can put on the breakfast table. That is still, to us, a small wonder.