EVVA's honey harvest brought in 190 kg

The bee season is over. Read the annual harvest report for the EVVA bees at the Wienerberg site here. To sum it up, this year was a very pleasing bee year.
“The spring this year was like a spring in the old days,” says Thomas Zelenka, the Viennese beekeeper, who looks after the EVVA bees with his team. “The temperatures rose slowly and steadily, and there was always plenty of nectar for the bees.”

The weather's impact on crop yield

The beekeeper is closely watching this year’s weather conditions. "If you think about the last few years, we often had a temperature increase from one day to the next from +5°C to +25°C as early as March. This is not so good for the bees because suddenly everything blossoms at the same time due to this temperature explosion and nature loses its balance."
It is much better for bees to continally find new flowering plants over a longer period of time. This allows bee colonies to develop well and grow into strong colonies. Making honey is a group effort because a honeybee only collects about 1 to 2 grammes throughout its entire life. The more bees live in a colony, the more honey they can collect for themselves and for us humans.
"June and July were again very hot and dry months, as in recent years, and most plants had too little water to produce nectar for the bees. This is how climate change is impacting bees."

Remarkable 38 kg of honey per colony

Yet the five EVVA bee colonies were able to collect a remarkable 190 kg of honey at the EVVA site in Vienna. This equates to an average of 38 kg of honey per bee colony. EVVA honey is now being stored in honey barrels and will soon be filled into jars. Of course, it has already been sampled and, once again, it tastes exceptionally good.
The same as after the last season, the five EVVA bee colonies will once again spend the winter on the terrace. If any problems arise, they will move to Thomas Zelenka’s winter home and return to EVVA in the spring.

About the EVVA bees

The EVVA bees are part of EVVA’s sustainability strategy. Due to the marked decline in the global bee population, in the spring of 2021, we decided to house five bee colonies with a total of around 300,000 bees at EVVA Vienna. They have found a new home on a sunny, accessible terrace. With this, EVVA aims to raise awareness of respectful use of the limited resources on our planet.

You can find more information about this here in the EVVA sustainability report