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!

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'.

Elderflowers

This is another beautiful work group activity. Harvesting elderflowers to dry for our new tea for kids which will be called Tea Party. I'll post the label design once it's ready. Many of us also made a fizzy drink out of the fresh flowers. It's important to use the European elderflower. Here's the recipe -

Elderflower Sparkler
3 1/2 cups sugar
2 cups hot water
4 large fresh elderflower heads
2 Tbsp. white wine vinegar
juice and pared rind of 1 lemon
4 litres of water

Mix the sugar with the hot water. Pour into a large glass or plastic container. Add all the remaining ingredients. Stir well, cover and leave for about 5 days.
Strain off the liquid into sterilized screw-top glass or plastic bottles. Leave for a further week or so. Serve very cold. Tastes good mixed half and half with fizzy water.

Check out the work of this intriguing artist. Makes me want to try making little scenes to photograph. Alex Mcleod