Recap: The Honey Harvest

Hey, thanks for stopping by! We thought we’d post a quick update on a project we recently finished working on. We’ll keep this update short and sweet, emphasis on SWEET.

We’ve got honey!!!

That’s it. Short and sweet, right? Just kidding…. We’ll go a little more into depth in case you are interested.

If you didn’t read our previous post about our honeybees, we sadly lost both hives to a merciless wasp invasion in early November. There were two positives we found in the situation: 1. We learned how to prevent that from happening next year (I mean, we thought we knew- now we really, really know!) And 2. We were able to save the honey! Forty-two pounds of it!

Over the next month, we harvested and packaged the honey, just in time for Christmas gifts. The reason it took a full month was because we processed the honey the slooow way, filtering it through strainers rather than using an extractor to spin the honey out with centrifugal force (….we’ll use that next year).

We still have plenty of honey leftover for selling throughout the year and at the store. For now, if you would like to order, you can do so through this contact form here. Pickup would be from the farm in Glen Aubrey OR from Casey & Rachel in Rochester if you can coordinate with one of their trips.

We are selling the honey for $7 in 1-lb glass jars, with the honey being raw (unpasteurized) and unfiltered. This means that the honey still contains all of the natural pollens, unlike the ultra-filtered bottles at the grocery store. The pollens are thought to have anti-allergenic properties if you have seasonal allergies. Some people buy pollen as a health food! Why take out the good stuff?

Any questions? Feel free to ask or comment!

We are very optimistic about next year’s honeybee operation…  We finally found a local source for our honeybee nucs, rather than farming them out from South Carolina. (In general you have to purchase your honeybees, though we have tried to catch them in the wild… it’s just harder that way!) We hope that the local bees will be much more resilient to the cold valley winters.

With the more resilient local bees and applying the hard lessons from the past two years, the third time should be the charm for getting our honeybees to survive. Until then, we’ll count our sweet blessings and share them around. 🙂