February 2016

 I guess I've been using our Honey Pie Facebook and Instagram pages instead of this blog to share photos and info for the last couple of years.  I decided it would be nice to get back to writing a bit more so lets see what has happened at Honey Pie Hives & Herbals since 2014.
We've added a few more varieties of mead to our selection. Since we already make and sell herbal teas which are popular we decided it would be interesting to use these teas to flavour our mead. There is a tradition in mead making of adding herbs to the fermentation and the resulting mead is called metheglin. Interestingly, the word comes from the same root as the word amethyst. The word meth means drunken and people used to believe that wearing amethyst could prevent you from getting drunk while drinking. Pictured here on either side of our Wildflower Mead are, on the left Picnic Mead, made from our Tea Party Tea containing wild sumac berries, elderflowers and red clover blossoms and, on the right, Lovers' Mead made from our Lovers' Tea containing ginger, basil, ginseng, saw palmetto berries, damiana and horny goat weed. It's a sweeter mead and very complex in flavour while the Picnic Mead is dryer and has a delicate flavour.

 Starting last spring in 2015, we built a stone patio outside our farm store. It was a lot of work but I love it so much! Here it is at the end of the season once the flower bed at the back had grown in nicely. We've got a few tables and chairs set up for customers to relax and taste the mead. We get a lot of cyclists who like to have a place to eat their lunch as well. We didn't serve any prepared food on the patio last summer but this year we plan to offer pie and scones to have with cups of herbal tea. Eventually we'll offer mead by the glass but we're not there yet.

 This sign has been out on the road at the end of our long lane to help get the idea across. I'm in the process of painting a bigger one for this year. We're on a curve in the road that makes it a bit too easy to drive right past our sign without noticing it. I'm also painting a few signs to put out a bit before our lane to give people more notice that it's coming up. I love the gold paint for the mead chalice - it looks like the holy grail.

 We took part in Taste - Community Grown in September as well as the Great Canadian Cheese Festival in June last year. We were so excited to be able to sample our mead at these big food and wine events in the County! This is Gavin pouring mead at Taste. It's great to be able to offer something new for people to sample. Many people have never tasted mead before so we love to explain how it's made and the history of mead.

 Our sunflowers were giant last summer and the bees loved them as usual. Here are a couple of big ones with our warre hive. As I mentioned before, it's an experiment to see how well the bees do in a top bar hive. So far they've stayed alive for two winters which is great. Since we only have one warre hive it's not a very scientific study. We have 100 langstroth hives which are the industry standard. Over the last three winters we've lost an average of 50% of our hives each year. We've rebuilt our numbers each spring through splitting existing hives and buying new bees. This loss is consistent with provincial average losses and is the reason the Ontario government has decided to phase out a class of pesticides called neonicotinoids for agricultural use. Studies have established a link between these chemicals and the weakening of honey bee health leading to high winter losses.

 Here is a pic of my honey man working the bees during one of his beekeeping workshops. He isn't wearing gloves here because he's just observing the bees and checking on the queen to see if she's laying eggs. It's possible to work slowly and carefully and avoid squishing bees. It's much easier to be careful when not wearing gloves.

 Gavin took a selfie at Niagara Falls in August 2015 while at the Eastern Apicultural Society Conference at the University of Guelph. He went on a bus tour to Niagara Falls with a group from the conference. He was invited to give a talk about mead making at the conference which went over very well.

This is a beehive carved from the trunk of a tree. Gavin saw this on a farm tour during the EAS conference. I'd love to have something like this at our place. I have been thinking for awhile now that I want to have more outdoor art along the theme of bees and honey and flowers. If anyone has any ideas they'd like to propose don't hesitate to contact me!

Welcome 2014!

Here's a little review of what we've been up to since the last time I wrote something.  Last year was a big one for us with our farm store opening.  This year will be even bigger as we are about to get a permit to sell our mead (honey wine) from the farm!  We don't have any photos of the mead yet as I'm still working on the label designs.  The photo at the top is of our hives ready for winter. 

We were walking in our woods in the fall and were so excited to find this tree covered in reishi mushrooms! This medicinal fungus (ganoderma lucidum) is used in traditional Chinese medicine as an anti cancer treatment. It is said to stop the growth of tumors. This is a woody type of mushroom with a shiny red surface, in the polypore family. The ones growing on our tree were past their prime and not usable but the fact that they are there is encouraging. We will have to check back in the coming year for new growth.

 We did the One of a Kind Christmas show again this year.  It was a great success and we had fun with our fellow crafters.  I made this bear for our booth to help get the conversation started with people about what's happening with the bees. People are concerned and so are we.  I think it's important to remember that this isn't an isolated event. The use of pesticides has been going on since World War II and people have documented the damage they have done to the ecosystem from frogs to birds to humans.  The class of chemicals that people are upset about now are called neonicotinoids. They are considered more serious than other pesticides because they don't break down in the environment. They have been found to kill large numbers of honey bees as well as cause secondary poisoning such as interruption of egg laying.  These chemicals are used on field crops like corn and soybeans but also on plants that are sold to gardeners for home use.  You may have gone to a garden centre to buy flowers to attract bees and brought home the very thing that poisons them.   If you'd like to sign a petition to save the bees, the Ontario Beekeepers have one here.

During the big ice storm this tree fell on some of our hives. One of them was destroyed and the lids of two others were damaged. The weather has been very cold for the bees but the blanket of snow on the lids helps insulate them. You can see in the photo that the hives have a black covering on the sides. This is a bubble wrap insulation jacket that we put on for the winter. Honey bees, like all insects, cannot move when the temperature drops below 10 degrees C. They stay inside the hive and generate heat by buzzing.  Their mission is to make sure the queen survives the winter so they form a ball around her and keep her in the centre. When the bees on the outside edges of the cluster get cold, they burrow in towards the centre to warm up.
We took so many beautiful photos of the ice covering everything.  I like how this one on the pine branches looks like ice flowers.

Our 7 year old daughter, Hazel, decided to make her own lip balm to sell.  It's pink and sparkly and cupcake flavoured! We used vanilla and cinnamon essential oils for the flavour. She drew the cupcake for the label herself.  We're putting a portion of the profits in her education savings account.





Here's a photo of Gavin and his beekeeping class last summer. He's offering the class again this year for the third year. We offer a discount for those who sign up for the class by Feb. 15.  Click here for more details and here for the Facebook page.

Spring at Last!

What a long slow spring it's been.  Our bees have been buzzing around the few flowers that are out looking for anything they can find.  This is a photo of a bumble bee in a trout lily.  We feel a bit like the bees as we bundle up and sit outside in the sun even though we're shivering.  The first bonfire of the year was just what we needed to toast us up.  We've been thinking a lot about a healthy alternative to marshmallows.  It's so much fun to roast something over a fire but the GMO corn syrup isn't one of our favorite things to ingest.  I did plant some marshmallow in the garden last year so maybe I can try making my own from the actual plant.  Here's what I found when looking for recipes.
I started teaching workshops this year.  Click here to go to our Facebook page with a list of all the workshops.  I've scheduled one a month from spring until fall.  The first one was a soap making one in April and it was lots of fun.  We made mint soap.  My next workshop is May 5 – Wild Crafting for medicine and food – What to eat and what to avoid. Learn which wild plants are ‘choice’ delicacies and which are just for looking at. We’ll discuss how best to preserve the plants and try out some recipes like wild pesto and nettle soup. I'll teach how to make tinctures, oil infusions and how best to dry herbs. We'll work with using field guides to identify plants. 

I've signed the kids up for a herb course this year that's called Herb Fairies.  It's by the lovely folks at Learning Herbs.  We bought their board game Wildcraft for the kids for Christmas and it's really inspired all of us to learn more about the plants that grow wild all around us and are useful in so many ways.  This is a picture of the first herb fairy from the course - Stellaria.  That's the Latin name for the common weed Chickweed.  They get an illustrated ebook about a different herb fairy each month.  There are activities and recipes and colouring sheets.  It's been very exciting for all of us.

My solar herb dryer project got put on hold over the winter but I am ready to go with all the parts for the greenhouse now.  I'm building a small greenhouse off of this old blue and white food truck.  The idea is to dry the herbs on wire racks in the truck box and use the greenhouse to heat it up in there.  Air flow is key when drying herbs so I'm making vents from the greenhouse into the truck and installing roof fans on the truck to draw the hot humid air out.  I'm hoping to not have to use any electricity to power the fans but rely on the convection action of hot air rising to turn the fans.  My original idea was to use recycled windows to build the greenhouse but I was worried about the truck shifting over time and cracking the glass.  I decided it would be safer and quicker to build a plastic hoop house instead.  It may not look as nice but I'm planning to make it work.
The big news this year is the opening of our new Farm Store!!! 

We plan to open June 1 and keep the store open until the end of October.  We'll be open 9-5 Wednesday - Sunday.  We're working hard to beautify the place in time.  We'll celebrate with a Grand Opening on Sunday June 9.  This will be a day long tea party with honey tasting, home made scones, garden tours and more. Since I don't have a photo of what our farm store will look like, I'll give you this photo of our booth at the Wychwood Green Barns farmers' market.  We'll still be at the Brickworks and Green Barns farmers' markets each Saturday year round.

Summer Delights

Summer has gone beyond full blown as we've passed through a drought and into a second flush of flowers. This is a sumac flower with a honeybee on it, taken before the drought.  The bees love the sumac flowers and we have so many of them you can hear a constant buzzing when they're working the flowers.  Now the sumac flowers have matured and turned bright red.  They are just about ready to harvest for our Tea Party Tea.

We decided to add some colour to our hives this year.  They've always been white in the past and I had painted a few flowers on some of them.  I think it looks so beautiful with all the colours mixed randomly in the field.  This is my honey man with the hives at the Prince Edward County Lavender Farm.

Here's our Hazel posing at the Lavender Farm's lavender festival.  We had a great time there trying lavender lemonade and lavender scones and seeing how lavender essential oil is made through steam distillation.

Here I am doing my thing.  This was at Vicki's Veggies spring seedling sale.  I've been doing so many sales this year but this is the only good photo from any of them.  We were also at the Midsummer Herbfest in Almonte and in Picton at the Women's Institute Craft Sale.

We're building a new solar herb dryer.  This is the beginning of the process. We put down cardboard and landscape fabric and got a load of gravel dumped on top. This is to keep the weeds from growing through the gravel.  Stay tuned for more photos of the process.  We have come up with an original design that we will share with you.

We have a wonderful new employee this summer named Katie.  Here she is uncapping a honey frame with the uncapping knife. She has done a lot of honey extracting this summer and it's not over yet.  It's hot, sticky work but she's so happy about it she wants to get her own bees!  We love you Katie!

Here's a recent shot of honey bees collecting nectar from an oregano flower.  We use this oregano in our Spicy Italian herbal seasoning.  It's so interesting to see the relationship between the herbs and the bees.

I had posted in the winter that I was ordering some new roses.  This is the new Apothecary rose with many pollinators on it.  I didn't manage to catch any honeybees on it but I think they did visit the roses.  The Madame Hardy rose I ordered wasn't available because of a crop failure.  I'll have to try again next year.

Spring Things

I've been experimenting with fermented drinks that are not alcoholic.  These are made with the whey from yogurt which you get by draining the yogurt in cheesecloth for a few hours.  From a litre of yogurt you can get over a cup of whey and you're left with a thick cream cheese like stuff that is delicious.  Here's the basic recipe:
1/4 cup of whey
1/4 cup honey
2 litres of liquid - I use herbal tea
optional - 1 cup of cooked fruit - blueberries are good, juice of a lemon, 4 tablespoons of grated ginger
Let it sit on the counter in a glass jar with a lid on for three or four days.  Strain and refrigerate and drink.
In this photo you can see I left the herbs in the tea while it fermented.  You can strain it before or after fermenting and it's fun to try both.  The jar on the right is our Catarrh tea and the one on the left is nettles with ginger and cranberries.  I didn't cook the cranberries but next time I would to get more flavour.

This lovely pink drink is made from our Tea Party Tea which is sumac, elder flowers and red clover.  It was delicious.  Other favorites include blueberry with lemon, ginger and lemon and our 5 Mint Tea.  I got my recipe from Sally Fallon's book Nourishing Traditions and I also tried her recipe for ginger beer which is a bit more complicated but delicious.  It involves making a 'ginger bug' which you feed every day for a week with ginger and sugar.  I used honey instead of sugar and it seemed to work just fine even though honey is antibacterial.  I guess at some point the wild bacteria are stronger.  Here's a great website that tells you in more detail how to do it.  I have really enjoyed the process and have plans to try all kinds of combinations this summer as more fruits are available.  I'm just about ready to try rhubarb ginger next!

The bees have been working away on all kinds of flowers.  Here's a male hazelnut flower with a honey bee on it.  See the spider on her web in the background?  The female flower of the hazelnut is a tiny bright purple hair!  There aren't any in this photo.  The pollen from the catkins blows around in the air and pollinates the female flowers which grow into hazelnuts.  Last year was our first harvest of hazelnuts and it was great fun for the kids.

The trilliums in our woods were attracting a lot of honey bees.  I lay down on the forest floor to photograph them.  The sound of bees buzzing all around me was gentle and lovely.  They were gathering lots of bright yellow pollen from the trilliums as you can see on the bee's hind leg.

You have to walk carefully through the grass when the dandelions are blooming.  The bees love dandelions and harvest a bright orange pollen from them.  We've been eating a lot of dandelion greens this year.  I add them to salad, saute with garlic, puree in soup and bake in quiche.  Dandelion helps you detox so it's a good spring cleanser.

Stinging nettles are another spring green we eat along with the dandelion greens.  When you cook them it gets rid of the stinging so don't try them in salad.  No bees on the nettles since they aren't flowering yet.  I've never noticed them on the nettle flowers before but I'll be sure to check this year.  I think the flower isn't noticeable enough for the bees to be interested though.

I tried a great recipe from Plant Healer Magazine for buckwheat pancakes.  You soak buckwheat groats overnight and drain them in the morning.  Then puree them in a food processor, add salt and thin with water until it's the consistency you want.  Cook like pancakes.  They take a bit longer to cook than traditional pancakes.  They have a wonderful flavour and if you make them thin like crepes they're good for wraps.  I tried them with yogurt cream cheese and sauteed nettles and garlic.  Wow!  For those who don't eat gluten these are gluten free.

Happy 2012 from Honey Pie!

Happy New Year to you all!  I haven't posted anything in such a long time I've decided to do a brief timeline in photos of what we've been up to since the summer.  On the right is a bee tree.  The kids and I saw this when we were on the Terry Fox run in Milford.  These are honey bees living in a tree just like in a story book.  On the left is a honey bee gathering nectar from the goldenrod flowers.  This is one of their main sources of nectar and pollen in the late summer and fall. 
 The end of summer is the time to harvest and dry as many herbs as we can.

We use a lot of mint in our herbal teas.  This basket is one of many we harvested and dried this year.   We made a pitcher of fresh mint tea after harvesting as much as we could carry.

This is me in our booth at Milford Fair in September.  It was a beautiful busy day for us.  My honey man was playing the big drum in the parade, I helped judge the art competitions, and we set up our tent with our wares.  Luckily for us we had Nana to help keep track of the kids and we started the day off right with pancake breakfast at the fair.

At some point I found time to do my first painting in ages.  It was a donation for a fundraiser for the Regent Theatre in Picton.  I worked from a photograph I took of a honey bee on a poppy.  I usually work from life but in this case a photo was the way to go.  It's oil paint on plywood.  It's very small - I think a foot square.  I was so happy to be painting again, I think I'll use some more of my bees on flowers photos and make a whole series.




We grew a lot of dry beans this year and had so much fun shelling them and sorting them into jars.  This kind is called molasses face.  The kids would often come home from school and sit down on the floor and start working on the beans.  Once Hazel looked up at me while I was explaining something to her and said, "Actually, I prefer silence while I'm shelling beans Mama."


 While not a very beautiful photo, this is very exciting for us.  These are the first of many experiments in mead making.  We used a fun and easy recipe for grocery store mead from here.  While the one on the left seemed to be fermenting the slowest it turned out to have the best flavour when we tasted it over Christmas.  It was made with our Tea Party tea mixed with honey.  The herbs in the Tea Party tea are elder flowers, sumac and red clover.  Now we want to try all the teas as mead.

Most of our time in the fall was spent getting ready for the One of a Kind Show in Toronto.  This was our third year having a booth at their Christmas show.  It was a real marathon - 11 days long - but worth it in the end.  We managed to have fun and stay healthy through the whole show!  Dressing up helps a lot.

Here's my family with our Christmas tree.  We went on a long walk and after much discussion as to it's merits selected this tree.  Consensus with children can be exhausting but very worthwhile.  We were all delighted with the tree and it was declared 'the best Christmas tree ever'.

A Swarm in June is Worth a Silver Spoon

It has been too long since I've posted so I think I had better make several posts so they don't get too big. This one is all about the bees. Not just honey bees but other pollinators as well.

The first photo is of a swarm of honey bees getting ready to land in a tree. They are flying around in what appears to be controlled chaos. It took about ten minutes or so for them to fly up out of the beehive and over to this tree near our driveway - about 40 feet away. They make a really loud buzzing sound and fly in a swooping circular pattern. They all move together as a group and settle onto something - usually a tree branch. This particular swarm actually decided to go back to the hive. I guess they decided conditions weren't right to move house at that time. We had never seen that before so I took a photo of them all crowding back into the hive. My honey man then went in and split the bees into two hives to prevent them from swarming again. When a hive swarms the old queen goes with them and a new queen is left behind with lots of bees and all the larvae to hatch out. They swarm because the hive is really strong and it's getting too crowded. It's good to catch the swarm so you have another hive but it's not always possible. Sometimes we catch them and they decide to leave again anyway. 'You never can tell with bees.' A.A. Milne


This photo of a bee being eaten by a spider is just because. This is the second time I've seen this recently. I wonder if bees taste like honey?

I left a patch of wild motherwort growing in my garden because we use it in our herbal tea, Femininitea which is for PMS and menstrual cramps. Motherwort is a natural sedative which is safe for women to use when pregnant or nursing. It has a bitter taste so we blend it with bee balm as well as cramp bark, bayberry bark, and raspberry leaves in our Femininitea which gives it a flavour similar to earl gray tea. This is a bumble bee on the motherwort flower.

Here is a honey bee collecting pollen from a gorgeous pink climbing rose. I posted a similar picture last year too but I can't resist.















Here is a very strange looking long legged bee or some kind of insect on a purple bachelor's button. I haven't figured out what it is yet but it is new to me. Anyone know what it's called?

I've been making bouquets for the farmers' markets again for several weeks now. This picture is from the Evergreen Brickworks Market. We also sell the bouquets at The Stop's Green Barns market. I use a combination of wild flowers like daisies and bladder campion, herbs like mint and oregano and garden flowers like bachelor's buttons and spurge and leaves like hostas. The varieties change over the season but I always mix them all together. 'Weeds are flowers too, once you get to know them.' A.A. Milne

We have discovered these amazing organic beekeeping podcasts. I especially enjoy the fat bee man.