We have both always wanted to keep bees, and of course maple syrup is a great farm activity because it usually wraps up around the time that planting season gets underway.
Maple Syrup
Bob Tapping Trees 
Boiling sap after dark 
The finished product
Last season we tapped 50 maple trees. We don’t have many maples at the farm, so we tap at another location that is only about a mile away. We use plastic tubing that works its way downhill until it gets to a large storage container. We tap the trees in late winter when we start having days in the forties and freezing nights. We use a small size tubing, and the inside diameter easily gets filled by the sap droplets and eventually as it travels downhill, it creates a vacuum in the line and ends up drawing more sap out of the trees. We need to pump the sap in the container into a 55 gallon drum which I strap to the bed of my truck and and then bring it to the farm to be boiled.
Our setup is pretty simple. First we have a small reverse osmosis machine which we run the sap through. It’s basically the same sort of filter that you would find under a sink in a house except it is configured differently. It’s built to pump some of the water in the sap through the filter. As the sugar molecules can’t fit through the filter, they stay on the original side of the filter. The filtered water is pumped out of a tube and either given to the alpacas or used to clean out the equipment later on. The sap that didn’t get put through the filter now has a higher sugar content, and it gets pumped out of a different tube and back into the original sap container. Using this system we can remove, at most, 3/4 of the water from the original sap before it is boiled. Our boiling stoves are very simple and slow, we are hoping to eventually upgrade to a more sophisticated set up. We need to either filter or boil away about 40 gallons of water in order to get one gallon of syrup.
Honey
Breanna checking on the bees 
A bee frame being examined 
Bob installing a new queen and workers into a hive
We currently have three hives and are planning to add a fourth this spring. Its quite a thrill to be working on the farm and see honey bees collecting pollen from one of our crops. They are such fascinating, complicated creatures that I don’t know if I’ll ever know enough about them to feel like I’m an expert bee keeper. At the moment, we are definitely still novices.
This summer we got our first honey harvest, and we are hoping that the hives we currently have, make it through the winter in good condition so we can get off to a strong start next spring. They don’t really require a lot of attention during the season. We just need to open up the hives every couple of weeks and take a look around to make sure everything is going as expected. Most of the work takes place during the harvest when we have to remove the frames, scrape off the capping and spin them to get the honey out. After we spin them out, we lay them out in front of the hives and the bees clean up any remaining bits of honey.