You should listen to this clip from The Splendid Table in which Marina Marchese makes a case for buying honey directly from beekeepers. It’s a little highbrow and maybe not quite 100% technically accurate, but it covers pretty much everything Henry and I have been saying (and doing) for a while. This is an event for sampling our honey, tasting our oranges, admiring our cutting boards, and chatting about homestead activities. Come see us, eh? If you need a reminder or want us to know that you’ll be there, you can RSVP via Facebook here ..read more

It’s honey harvest time around these parts. In the Oregon Coast Range where Henry (doing business under the name Old Blue) has his remote apiaries, the nectar flow has pretty much dried up to a trickle even though there’s still plenty of pollen to be had. Henry is now working on preparing hives for the long winter by equalizing colonies, requeening if necessary, and beginning to feed syrup and pollen substitute. Most other commercial beekeepers are treating for mites right now, but Henry has chosen to manage his hives without standard miticide applications for the third season in a row.   ..read more

This spring, Henry agreed to pollinate at Radke’s Blueberries, hands down the best U-pick blueberry farm in the Corvallis area if not the entire world (read more about the place here). Blueberry growers generally contract with beekeepers to drop off two or more hives per acre during bloom time. Having honeybees on hand ensures widespread pollination and a good fruit set. Bumblebees are highly effective blueberry pollinators, even better than honeybees, but commercial blueberry farms often have large fields with only bits of bumblebee habitat around the fringes, and that scale limits the ..read more

As things warm up around here, Henry’s been starting to schedule 2013 honeybee extractions. (I’m using the term “honeybee extraction” in this post to mean the act of removing unwanted honeybees that are living on their own in people’s barns, garages, rotten trees, etc.) The next month  and a half or so is the best time of year (as opposed to summer) for doing extractions for several reasons: colonies are smaller with fewer bees and less brood to have to worry about rehiving, the bees will have longer to recover and establish strong hives over the summer, less nectar in the hives means th ..read more

Honeybee’s comb is about the coolest stuff ever. It’s beautiful, functional, symmetrical, and it smells good to boot. Comb is also a wonderfully multipurpose substance. It provides structure for a hive, the right nooks and conditions for rearing brood, and storage space for pollen and of course, honey. Bees have four pairs of glands on their abdomen that secrete wax flakes that young bees pick off, chew up, and mold into comb. The color of new comb depends on current nectar sources, the race of honeybees in the hive, how much/what type of pollen they’re collecting, and other factors, but ..read more

Our Spring Honey Samplers will begin shipping March 15. You can find our Spring Honey Samplers for sale here or become a year-long honey subscription member here. Siletz : Vine Maple & Blueberry Our Siletz apiary is at Gibson Farms where our bees pollinate 20 acres of blueberry bushes in the early spring. The first bushes in the patch were planted in 1948, and the farm has been under the management of the same family for almost 70 years. Gibson Farms is surrounded by pastureland, riparian areas, and regenerating forest with significant populations of vine maple and scotch broom. The bees ..read more