Category Archives: Honey
Bumblebee Honey For Sale?
My brother was at a farmer’s market in North Carolina this weekend. A vendor was selling a thimble-full of honey for $10. Maybe slightly more than a thimble. The seller told my brother that you wouldn’t smother a pancake with … Continue reading
Saving Honey
Brag time. We just got home from the big Calgary science fair competition. My 13-year-old won three awards. Here’s the kicker: his project was called Saving Honey with Sound. His experiment was based on sending ultrasonic energy waves into combs … Continue reading
Location, Location, Vocation
My last two blog posts (Alberta is Beekeeping and Canada’s Hive Beetles) were unseemly braggadocious pitches. I wrote about how great beekeeping is on Canada’s western prairies. Alberta, Canada, has not had CCD, but instead has increasing numbers of kept … Continue reading
Manuka Recall
For years, I’ve been thinking that manuka honey is over-rated. And maybe overpriced, though every beekeeper’s honey should sell at $80/pound retail, as manuka sometimes does. Why is manuka honey so expensive? It could be partly due to brilliant marketing. … Continue reading
Cuba’s Organic Honey
Long before the embargo and before the Castro brothers, Cuba was a beekeeper’s paradise North American gringos operating Cuban honey farms. Spain ruled Cuba for almost 400 years, but the United States took it as a trophy after the Spanish-American … Continue reading
Bumper Crop
The numbers are in and the prize goes to Alberta. Alberta, a province in western Canada, has once again won the prestigious honey production award. For those of us who learnt beekeeping where 50-pound crops are the norm (in my case, … Continue reading
The Honey Threshers
A century ago, threshing crews worked their away across the American and Canadian prairies, harvesting farmers’ grains. When I was rather young (not quite a century ago) one of my Saskatchewan buddies signed up for a threshing crew job. Maurice … Continue reading
Beekeeping Promo Flashback
This video goes back about 15 years, but a friend asked me about the 6 minutes of local fame I experienced on the Dave Kelly morning show, so I looked up the film. The quality of the tape (and my … Continue reading
Chinook Honey and Mead
Friends of ours have a honey-wine shop in the town of Okotoks, just a few minutes south of Calgary. They make their own mead from their own honey. They do it really well. Art retired from flying commercial airliners to … Continue reading
Every Day is Labour Day
In Canada and the USA, a lot of people get a day off from work today. Unless your job is in a store, hospital, police station, prison, theatre, restaurant, hotel, airport, the military, or nuclear power plant. Or if you … Continue reading