Since honey is relatively plentiful and cheap, why do we bother literally minding our own beeswax?
As avid gardeners, beekeeping is a natural extension of our love of nature. There are few things more satisfying than working our vegetable gardens and seeing our bees visiting the cucumber and zucchini flowers, or sipping water from our koi pond, or buzzing past us with visible clumps of yellow or orange pollen sacks on their back legs. Beekeeping is an intellectual pursuit as well; it is not intuitive, and there are no "rules" for how anything is done. It's all by feel, by gauging the weather, and by experience. Every honey crop is different in terms of abundance, color, and taste. Each hive has its own personality.
One reason why we feel so strongly about raising our own honey using traditional methods that complement and encourage natural bee behavior, is that we've learned that much of the honey for sale is the result of dubious ethical practices: "fake honey" is common from overseas, doctored with sugar water and coloring agents, and local honey has the same problems of being largely sugar water fed to the bees, who happily store it as honey. Sugar water is NOT honey: honey has vitamins, minerals, pollen, and enzymes, along with unique flavors. No two crops of honey are alike (unless a flavored honey - more on that below). Problem is, nobody can tell if the honey you purchase is real 100% honey or honey with sugar water, or worse, honey with added fructose. Raising our own honey means we know what we're eating!
A second reason why we are beekeepers is that in learning about hive collapse, we realized that perhaps it has a lot to do with another dubious ethical practice rampant in commercial farming: pollination services. A beekeeper makes 10x the money from pollination services compared to selling honey, so the motivation to rent hives is very strong and in many cases financially necessary. There is great demand for specific flavored honeys such as clover, buckwheat, knotweed, alfalfa, and apple blossom that encourages stressful commercial beekeeping standards that are harmful to the bees. The only way to get clover honey, for instance, is to make sure that the bees only have access to clover, and such monoculture feeding is nutritionally deficient for raising healthy young bees. Trucking the hives around the country is also stressful for the bees: after 4 weeks in one location, during the night they're all loaded into trucks, driven a few or several thousands of miles, plopped into fields, and in the morning - they're at it again. Frames of honey from the last field are removed, to ensure that the flavored honey is not mixed with the next flavor. Hives are plopped into the middle of orchards or in fields with no shade. Do bees in nature live in the hot sun? NO! they live in open shade, where it's not as hot and they do not have to expend so much energy trying to regulate hive temperatures. The warming sun wakes up the bees earlier in the day - which translates into better production - and more heat stress. The bees go on this roadshow from state to state for the entire growing season, starting in February in California's almond orchards and around the country to pollinate apples, clover, blueberries, melons, and a variety of other crops, down to citrus in the winter. Bees do not hibernate - but winter allows them to rest. Modern commercial bees are flying workhorses worked to death. Our beehives stay in the bee yard, and the bees always come back to the same home.
At Philosopher Lane, we produce gallons of honey, not hundreds or thousands of gallons. There is the fall crop and perhaps if lucky, a spring crop as well. We have a finite amount of honey produced and available for purchase, and no two batches are ever the same. Sure, it's more money than store honey, but it's also different than store honey: this is real, organic wildflower honey produced in Adams Township, from local flowers and vegetables. We grow many types of flowers and try to ensure there is always something blooming at all times. We don't use chemicals either; our lawn has clover and a host of other "weeds" that the bees love. While we could easily stretch our honey with sugar water, or purchase someone else's extra honey and label it as our own - it makes no sense. We eat this honey too - and we want real honey, with all its vitamins, minerals, protein, enzymes, and goodness. Sugar water has none of these things. At Philosopher Lane, we are thinking beekeepers. and we mind our own beeswax in a way that lets the bees be bees, with minimal meddling on our part. It's better for the bees and we think for us as well. In exchange for a nice home in the shade of the maples and oaks, out of the wind, and protected from marauding bears, we get the benefit of more plentiful vegetables and flowers, and delicious, healthful honey to sweeten our lives. With every golden sweet spoonful, we are grateful for the bees' industry, and humbled by the wonders of nature. Honey is a sweet reminder of the miraculous nature of a honeybee.
Disclaimers: Blog posts are opinions, not advice. One thing all beekeepers will agree on, is that if you ask 10 beekeepers what to do, you'll get 13 different answers. Beekeeping is alchemy, nature, and a bit of magic.
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