A Ton of Honey: Managing Your Hives for Maximum Production

I came to Pastor Gillard’s writings by way of researching the Nicot queen rearing system. Grant had written a small book on the subject and it was well reviewed, so I bought a copy for myself. The advice is aimed at the hobbyist beekeeper; but why would a hobbyist be interested in “a ton of honey” from each hive? Why not just run a few more hives and accept a mediocre performance from each?Gillard explicitly states that commercial beekeepers, who do not have the time/labour to micromanage, split their hives in spring to control swarming and accept that this means mediocre honey yields per hive. Even though there are a myriad of things the hobbyist can do in pursuit of building big, strong, swarm-free colonies to meet the nectar flow, even hobbyists have only so much time to lavish on hive management. For the hobbyist, it pays multiple dividends to tend fewer hives to get the same amount of honey. You can take better care of the bees, and they can deliver you a bumper crop.Big, strong hives not only gather nectar and create honey more efficiently, big, strong hives present only one problem: swarming (and Gillard devotes an entire chapter to swarm prevention technique). But small hives are heir to a host of problems: they struggle to compete and feed themselves, struggle to raise brood and queens, are prone to robbing, have a harder time regulating the temperature in the brood nest, and just generally are on the edge; more likely to suffer stress and, therefore, disease.Big hives give you options. Small hives give you challenges!Pastor Gillard goes on to recommend that you spend the bulk of your energies on your very best and most robust hives. “Keep your best management on the strongest, best-looking hives you got.” The bulk of your honey production will be coming from those hives, and smaller hives that are dawdling and just not gaining momentum are not worth much time or trouble. Give them a chance, but don’t invest a lot of time and energy in your “dinks”, as they will seldom reward you for all that TLC.In pursuit of that elusive ton o’ honey, Pastor Gillard uses a simple set of techniques applied with rigour. None of these techniques will be new to you, but applied together and with diligence, Gillard finds they will make the most of your bees and the local nectar flow.I will leave the interesting details to the author, but in a nutshell, he builds strong colonies under young queens, applies swarm prevention, supers them generously with (preferably) drawn comb ahead of the nectar flow, harvests continually throughout the nectar flow, and then allows the bees to build strongly for winter, doing his splitting and requeening after the honey flow ends.You may find the very large type face used in the book distracting, and you may chafe a bit under Gillard’s signature, repetitious style. Don’t! The information is presented first in outline form, then in more depth, and finally in exacting detail. As he goes through this process, the good Pastor does what all good mentors do: he explains not only what he is doing, but why. That is a very valuable process.“A Ton of Honey” is a well thought out mini-course in good beekeeping practice. Whether you adopt all the techniques presented, or just add one or two to your beeyard, you will be well rewarded. Rewarded, one hopes, with golden buckets of sticky goodness!

This book has provided some ideas and incite that is helping me to begin formulating a plan for next season. I can tell you that as a result of this book, I will be much more hands-on than in my previous season. For this reason, I commend it to beekeepers who are in their 2nd year or further along who want to maximize their honey harvests.The author sometimes makes points again and again. Though some may see that as mere redundancy, I suspect it is intentional for guys like me who need to have certain points repeated and drilled into my head so it's not forgotten. Therefore, I am not going to deduct any points for that. (It contains no pictures or illustrations)I appreciate the author's passion for beekeeping and I commend him for taking the time to write this book and experiences with us.-Rhett KelleyKelley Honeybee Farmhttp://KelleyHoneybees.com

At 280 pages long, when it arrives you think the book has some substantive information. You would be wrong. The print is very large, and the margins are wide. Typos throughout the book. I finished the book in a weekend, and I'm not a speed reader. As far as information goes, there are a ton of stories about unrelated topics, and whole chapters devoted to "you can do it . . . but it's work." I didn't actually get to any substantive material until page 65 of the book. Oh, and there was a chapter devoted to how he chose the title of the book. He constantly repeats himself, over and over again. In the end, his "strategy" for higher honey production comes down to a few factors, which you can get from the titles of the chapters. Then you can just about stop reading. He doesn't really go into depth much on each factor. Disappointing. Plus, some information was just plain wrong (like stating that pollen substitute is more nutritionally balanced than natural pollen). I would not recommend.

5 stars for the author's funny enthusiasm...easy, fun read, but northern beekeepers will find this approach a little frustrating since our biggest problem is getting the bees through winter due to varroa and their viruses. Maximizing honey production for the hobbyist is a luxury, but good to think about.

At first read I was disappointed,because I expected some breakthrough techniques to hit me in the head like a hammer.On the other hand it is a digest of solid proven beekeeping dogma condensed into one volume.The info the author relates to his readers would require reading many ,many other books to gain the most important and critical details to improving your honey production. One detractor in my opinion, is that there are too many"stories for another day" quoted by the author.

The book was OK, but really the "facts" of how to increase your harvest of honey was very limited and could have been summed up in a few handful of pages. Instead the reader is forced to read through hours of motivational junk and analogous stories. Reading this book I was constantly reminded of television motivational speakers and pyramid scheme sales folks. Most of the ideas to increase your harvest and fairly well known by anyone who has been keeping bees for more than a year or two. Can you glean a few useful tips and tricks or a new idea of how to approach something from this book... sure you can. Is it worth the few hours of read time to get at those facts... So so

I enjoyed this book and will read it once a year to mentally prepare myself to manage my hives and be a better beekeeper. Grant Gillard gives very specific tips for managing for maximum honey production. Like his other works, this book is "self published." Since the theme of this book is excellence, I only wish someone would have proof-read the text to fix the dozen or more spelling and grammatical errors before printing. Back to content- I highly recommend this book to anyone needing a sense of what it will take to get the most from their hives.

Great ideas on how to better manage hives for more honey.

probably to worst use of paper I have ever seen in all my life, accross any field of literaturethe author keeps referencing to useless anecdotes unrelated to the point, there are no diagrams or pictures of any sort. no comparative analisysessentially a guy ranting about his prowess in getting a ton of honey with no real useful data and a real ton of midwest redneck anecdotes

Some interesting facts when he finally gets to them.

Usefull info set out in a sensible way.