Honey Laundering??

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My friend Paul in Washington DC has a wacky sense of humor. When he led one of his recent emails with "don't look now but your honey has been laundered," I thought he was sending me a link to some weird news story about a beehive making it through a car wash. The link was to Food Safety New's early November 2011 findings that 3/4rths of imported honey sold in grocery stores doesn't qualify as honey. As I understand the issue, it boils down to having detectable pollen, which means the honey source can be identified. In the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration says any product that's been ultra-filtered and no longer contains pollen isn't honey.

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Pick up Beekeeping Catalogs

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If you're tempted to keep bees, order a few beekeeping catalogs to get familiar with terms, products and prices.

One of the best tips I can share is pick a company relatively close to your home. Beekeeping equipment is heavy and shipping prices can be daunting.

You can usually order catalogs online through major beekeeping companies like Dadant, Walter T. Kelly and Brushy Mountain.

Charlotte

First Hives

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My neighbor Rudy used to keep bees. He would periodically come by to retrieve them when a swarm would settle into one of my Chinese maple trees. He said they couldn't resist my garden, a mixture then of native Missouri wildflowers and garden center sale perennials.

Years later, when I put beekeeping on my bucket list, I thought about Rudy and how he would dress to get his bees - rubber boots, a stained white space suit, chicken wire veil. Those were his best tools.

My beekeeper's best friends include a veiled hat; good leather gloves; smoker; hive tongs and hive brush. I think Rudy would approve.

Charlotte

Looking for Queen Bee

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My assignment was to find one of my honeybee queens and (sigh) kill her. One of my two honeybee hives had been struggling. The verdict from more experienced beekeepers was that my queen bee - she's the only one in the hive of 40,000 plus honeybees that lays - is not laying her 1,200 eggs or so a day so she needs to be removed. Normally a queen bee will live 4-5 years, as opposed to a worker bee's 6 weeks of life producing 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey.

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Welcome to Home Sweet Bees

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When I started keeping honeybees in 2010, I had no intention of falling in love. Bees, I thought, would be fun to add to the garden to help plant pollination.


I now teach and lecture on beginning beekkeeping and started a bee club to help beekeepers share and learn from each other.

I’m also developing my own lines of honey and bee-related products, not to mention being hooked on my own homemade whipped honey.

Have you tried it yet?

Charlotte