Bienenhof Mandl
A little background about our company and the family.
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Family
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Full-time employees
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Bee colonies
Bienenhof Mandl is an agricultural and forestry business run by my wonderful wife Klaudia and myself. Together we try to master the daily chaos. Our two daughters Maja and Sonja help to ensure that this task doesn’t get boring.
With 20 full-time employees (a little more in summer, a little less in winter), we look after around 15,000 bee colonies and around 70 hectares of forest. We are a pure primary producer of honey, beeswax, propolis, pollen, queens and bee colonies and not a trader.
I started keeping bees around 30 years ago with a colony in Styria and later completed my training at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences with my dissertation: “The pollination performance of the honey bee”.
I trained as a master beekeeper at the Vienna Beekeeping School and the Lower Austrian Beekeeping School in Warth. My training as a forestry specialist was made possible by the Pyhra agricultural college.
We are a beekeeping training company (we usually have two to three beekeeping apprentices) and the largest breeding and testing company for honey bees.
The data of our queens can be viewed publicly in the international breeding database beebreed.eu. There we form the breeder group AT-2 Bienenhof Mandl in theCarnica population ofAustrian professional beekeepers with close friends.
Our focus in beekeeping is on the vitality of the bee colonies, which includes Varroa resistance and resistance to various bee diseases. A striking feature of this is the increased propolis production of our colonies, which we consciously promote.
As we live from the surplus honey produced by our bees, the honey yield is an important indicator in breeding.
In addition to these features, we are also committed to preserving the historic Austrian lines. We still run the lines: Wintersbach, Bukovsek, Geschütz, Troiseck, C1 and Putz.
The apiary has been certified organic for many years and we want to enrich the environment with our work and not burden it. Two years ago, we had the gas supply to the apiary disconnected and we heat with a wood gasification system using our own wood from our forests.
We are supplied with electricity from a photovoltaic system on the roof. We have already electrified part of our vehicle fleet and will continue to switch to electric vehicles in the coming years so that we no longer need diesel.
We try to make our forest areas bee-friendly. We reforest many different types of trees and shrubs, while our bees pollinate the many different flowers and thus contribute to increasing biodiversity.
We leave old and dying trees in our bee forests and can therefore enjoy a variety of already rare insects and birds.
Our beehives look shabby, we make them from unplaned boards and do not paint them. Some of our hives have been in use for over 20 years and look correspondingly worn. The bees use the various holes created by mice, woodpeckers or beetles in our hives and feel as if they are in their original homes, the tree hollows.
Years ago, we carried out a study and found that significantly more ants and also more ant species live in our apiaries than 150 m or 300 m away without bees. Keeping honey bees has a significant positive impact on increasing biodiversity.
We fill our honey into jars ourselves at the apiary and deliver it to Spar Austria. As a result, our honey has been available throughout Austria for many years and we are very grateful for this cooperation. Thanks to the many tourists in Austria who take jars of honey home with them as souvenirs from Spar, our honey makes it all over the world and I am always amazed at where we get friendly and warm feedback from.
So I hope that we can experience many more wonderful years with our bees and trees.
Your Stefan Mandl
