Apple Acres Farm

Apple Acres Farm We offer farm stays, tours, classes, and seasonal farm products.

Apple Acres Farm is an off-grid, small-scale farm inspired by regenerative permaculture design principles and the desire to create a sustainable, resilient, and local lifestyle.

The garden at peak cuteness 🌱From here on out, things will gradually decend into jungle chaos. Granted productivity will...
06/12/2026

The garden at peak cuteness 🌱

From here on out, things will gradually decend into jungle chaos. Granted productivity will also increase, but I'll miss the current orderly beauty 🌿

Busy bees 🌸🐝
05/31/2026

Busy bees 🌸🐝

Queen bees and nucs 🐝Seeing a queen bee is always special. It's not only because it can be tricky to find one bee in the...
04/23/2026

Queen bees and nucs 🐝

Seeing a queen bee is always special. It's not only because it can be tricky to find one bee in the midst of tens of thousands of bees. It's because she makes a hive viable. Without a queen, you just have a box of bees.

Buckfast bees are known for swarming and we had a very strong hive coming off of a long winter. With today's summer-like weather, I was able to make a split (nuc) by removing three frames of capped brood (inner frames) and two frames of honey and pollen (outer frames).

There are many benefits to making a split in the spring:

🐝 Provides a brood break while they raises a new queen, which reduces the varroa mite population.

🐝 Simulates swarming by removing the queen as well as a portion of the bees and honey from the hive.

🐝 Improves the hive's chance of surviving the winter (by raising a young queen)

🐝 Allows the bees to select their own queen

In 7-10 days I'll check back to make sure the hive is raising several queens 🤞

Warrior Archie 🐓We were able to rehome our two barn roosters last week, but one hour before their departure, Archie and ...
04/18/2026

Warrior Archie 🐓

We were able to rehome our two barn roosters last week, but one hour before their departure, Archie and one of the roosters had a bit of a tussle.

Four roosters running around was too much, especially when the younger two wanted to say hi to the ladies in the coop. Archie was having none of it.

Thankfully they were both young and didn't have pointy spurs, so everyone walked away fine, if not a little beat up in the face, comb and/or waddles (Archie refused to let me take a photo of his other side, which is the worse of the two).

We'll miss the barn roosters (they were sweet little dudes), but it's nice not to constantly have eye out for potential rooster drama.

First hive inspection of the year thanks to today's summer-like weather ☀️I had already opened up the hive to remove the...
04/17/2026

First hive inspection of the year thanks to today's summer-like weather ☀️

I had already opened up the hive to remove the moisture and briefly check on their food supply. Both hives had over 100 lbs of honey going into the winter and I was happy to see they still had plenty to get them through the spring.

Thousands of bees die during the winter, which tend to pile up in between frames of the bottom boxes as well as on the bottom board. This contributes to high moisture conditions (leading to mold) and can block the front entrance.

Today I removed the bottom 2-3 boxes that were mostly empty of bees and honey, shifted the top boxes to the bottom and added an empty box to the top.

Bees like to move up, so swapping full boxes to the bottom and adding an empty box above will help prevent a swarm. Buckfast bees are known to swarm, so I'll be making a couple of nucs with the overwintered queens to encourage both hives to raise new queens.

I left the frames with mold out in the sun to disinfect (after removing the dead bees). The bees will clean these frames up, but this makes their job easier.

Enjoying a lazy spring day in the sun 🐐What you can't see in this photo are all the honey bees checking out the coffee g...
04/16/2026

Enjoying a lazy spring day in the sun 🐐

What you can't see in this photo are all the honey bees checking out the coffee grounds right next to the goats 🐝

The goats normally lounge on their benches but today they decided they wanted to hang out with their bee friends.

☀️

Address

Houghton, MI
49931

Opening Hours

4pm - 6pm

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