Bowral Bee Co PTY LTD

It’s that time of the year again. Swarm season. Swarms flying around and hanging from just about anything. Trees, cars, electrical switch boards, power meters, in telephone pits and the list goes on.

If you see bees hanging around anywhere this season, give us a call. Swarm collection is free of charge.

One of our friendly team will come out to you and collect the bees and bring them to one of our apiaries.

Each collection gets a free jar of honey. I little thank you from us. A sweet treat for you and your family to enjoy.

Bowral Bee Co. Pty Ltd
Ph: 0404912009 / 02 4862 3321

This morning it was time for education. Bowral Bee Co. set out for an incursion at Bowral Public School. The kindergarten learnt all about bees and pollination this morning.

Children were able to see living bees up close and got to eat their own pot of our delicious honey.

The children enjoyed their time with our bees.

Bowral Bee Co. attended free of charge. Education for this age group is priceless.

🐝

It’s world bee day today

The world would not be the same without these magnificent little pollinators. Our food supply would dry up and we would not be in good health if there weren’t any fruits and vegetables added to our diets. Beside protein and fibre, fruits, vegetables and seeds give us all the vital nutrients our bodies need to function. Every living animal whom roam this planet has some kind of interaction with bees either directly or indirectly for its survival too.

Let’s celebrate and look after these majestic insects that we owe our entire lives and existence to.

Mead

Why make mead? Mead is made from fermenting honey and water. It’s thousands of years old. It’s the oldest beverage known to human kind.

Beekeepers have been making mead for over 9000 years. It’s a well known fact that if you want to buy honey go see beekeepers. Some meads aren’t as good as some other meads. It’s up to personal taste that deciphers good from not so good mead.

For example we didn’t like our strawberry mead and preferred our oaky honey and spiced meads more whereas other people liked the strawberry mead to the point it became the Champion mead for 2026 at the Sydney Easter Show.

Mead is different from other beverages. It’s the least amount of work. It’s a fast to slow process depending on a heap of factors.

B**r needs grain starches to be converted to sugars so it becomes b**r. It’s a two or three step process. Fermentation is quick.

W**e starts out as grapes. Is squeezed into barrels and through a combination of things becomes w**e. Can take months to several years to make.

Spirits are distilled from above. The process is volatile and highly combustible. It’s at times extremely dangerous. Extracting the pure alcohol from the fermentation of an alcoholic drink or mash.

Even though it’s not in detail each process for making these items is unique and different. Different manufacturers make different products. Amounts to different flavours of drinks and percentage of alcohol.

Some mead makers ferment over a few weeks. Some over several months. Each mead is unique.

You can have 100 honey meads in a row on a bench and taste each one. They will all have their own unique flavour and own profile. Clear or cloudy. Some will have sediment at the bottom. A fine mist is ok.

Mead for us a journey. It starts in the fields of flowers our bees gather nectar from and then take back to the hives where they store it for winter. Each frame of honey may be a different flavour to the next. Our honey is pressed and goes straight into pales. The pales are divided and we make mead with quite a substantial amount of honey.

Then the magic begins.

3 meads sitting and waiting. Tiny bubbles and so the fermentation begins. These small tanks the meads will live in for a few weeks till they are moved into maturing barrels. The material make up of these barrels varies based on the mead itself.

Each one next years surprise. You won’t know the flavours till after the Sydney Easter Show.

Some recipes are closely guarded. That’s why they call it a competition.

There’s another 5 joining this lot. Some are going to very different to what’s out there. These will definitely be some of the most unusual meads.

We are looking forward to next year.

Skål

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

We will remember them
Lest we forget

And there you have it Champion Mead 2026. Award of Excellence 2026

We are blown away

Speechless!!

The bottles that aren’t opened go into a special cupboard the tasted bottles go down the drain.

The rest of the batches go into a racking cupboard sort of like you would have for keeping bottles of w**e. This week it’s time to make Easter Show and Camden Show Mead for 2027.

It’s mead making time for us. The way we make it a closely guarded secret after all if everyone made mead the same way there wouldn’t be any competition.

Good luck to everyone making next years mead. We will have some new flavours for next year’s mead. Strawberry isn’t one of them even though this year it was the champion mead. Sometime in the future when we do this on commercial scale to sell to the public we will make the strawberry mead again and the others we have in our collection.

Well 8:30pm is a bit too far away and I’m sick of waiting around when I know the results. So here you have it. Here are our 6 winners with an extra mystery anonymous one thrown in there.

Jess E
Deb C
Vicky B
Amanda M
Karen C
Katie H
And a mystery extra bottle to someone special whom wants to be anonymous.

Well done to all our winners.

Now remember a little zap in the microwave and it will change your life.

We will notify you all shortly. Well done team BEE.