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The much needed rain has meant that the bees are now buzzing about in the Southern Highlands.

"We've had so much rain, everything is really lush and gorgeous and the bees are out and about every day," she said.

"We were quite fortunate that we didn't lose hives during the drought or that really bad smoke period.

"The interesting thing now is the honey has a smokey component to it which i think is quite lovely.

"The biggest threat during that time period were the ants. The ants were just going nuts robbing the honey."

Due to the drought period Ms McLaughlin said that she had lost up to 80 percent of the honey yield but that the recent rain and good weather mean that a slow recovery was possible.

"There's definitely an increased honey yield with the rainfall," she said.

"As it rains, everything starts to bloom, everything is flowering.

"It's been tricky because we are now at the stage where we should be doing our last harvest and we are now looking to do a second harvest."

Normally we can do five harvests in a regular period and that has been significantly reduced."

Ms McLaughlin said that her main priority was to make sure the hives stayed viable and healthy and had taken measures to help the hive.

"Where we would've taken three quarters of the honey we now take only a third of the honey from each hive," she said,

"In good conditions each hive would produce 40 - 60 kg of honey and currently we are now probably doing about 10 kg per hive but that's because we are being particularly conservative.

With the cold weather on the way, Ms McLaughlin hopes to do one more harvest of honey before the bees hibernate for the winter.

"I want to do one more harvest of honey and to do that we need to wait for a really lovely warm day so we can get up there and get the honey flowing."

Bulwarra Bees Cough Serum is now available. You can buy direct from Deborah via the Bulwarra Bees Facebook page.

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