Happy Imbolc

Happy Imbolc! Today, February 2 is the pagan holiday that marks the halfway point between Winter Solstice and Spring Equinox. It's Celtic name is St. Brigid's Day and it's Christian name is Candlemas. Candle lighting is central to the celebration of this day as we celebrate the return of the sun and the lengthening days. Here at Honey Pie Hives & Herbals we are pleased to introduce an exciting new beeswax candle - a Treasure Candle! Hidden inside a pillar candle are gem stones which can only be released by burning the candle. Our first variety is a Love candle which contains three gem stones chosen for their affinity with the heart. Light the candle with the intent to welcome love into your heart. Once you have extracted the gems you can make your own love charm with them as they are beads. Look for the Treasure Candles at the Green Barns farmers' market in Toronto and at upcoming Seedy Saturdays in Ottawa, Kingston and Picton. 

It's also the time of year to sign up for our Beekeeping Workshops. This hands on class is for beginners. Gavin takes you through the season with a full day class once a month from April to September. If you've ever dreamed of keeping bees this is a great way to learn. The course covers building your hive (as seen in this photo), installing your bees, maintaining the hive, harvesting honey, winterizing the hive and more. There's plenty of opportunity for asking questions and sharing stories with your fellow bee lovers. In the photo below Gavin shows the class around inside a beehive to learn to identify the three different bees in the hive - the queen, the drones and the workers. Everyone goes home to inspect their hive and see if they can find the queen.

One of my projects last year was to paint this photo board with a fantastical version of the queen bee and one of the workers. People love posing and getting their photo taken outside our farm store. I think it would be fun to paint a few more of these. Wouldn't it be great to have them around Prince Edward County at different tourist attractions? If you'd like me to paint one for you let me know - winter is the best time for projects like this.

We were very honored last fall to receive a regional Premier's Award for Agri-Food Innovation. This was for the technique we use for making our mead which reclaims honey that would otherwise be wasted. It was so interesting to discover all the other recipients of the award. Our friends at Pyramid Ferments got their second Premier's Award for their delicious gut shots. Congratulations Alex and Jenna! The top prize went to a shrimp farm in Campbellford, Ontario! How amazing to be able to get local shrimp.

The highlight of my year was the opportunity to go to Turin, Italy as the delegate of our local chapter of Slow Food for their event Terra Madre. Much of this event is an open air market where food producers from around the world are sampling their wares. I worked a couple of shifts in the Canada booth where we were sampling salmon from a sustainable native fishery in BC, raw milk cheese from Quebec, and maple syrup from Nova Scotia. The booths from Italy are the biggest section of the event. There were long rows of hazelnut producers, cheese makers and of course countless places to sample wine. I took some of our mead to be sampled in a workshop on mead. There were three Italian meads, a Japanese mead and ours. It was all conducted in Italian so I was a bit lost but I can tell you that our mead was most similar to the Japanese mead which was light and delicate in flavour. The Italian meads were all heavy and sweet. One of them, from Sicily was made by boiling the honey down with oranges. As we don't cook our honey the flavour was entirely different. In the picture I'm next to a pyramid of honey from all over Italy.  Slow Food promotes the preservation of food culture and small farming. It was inspiring to meet so many people from all over the world who care about the things that I care about and work in the same industry. I met a young lawyer from Argentina who is working on the international tribunal against Monsanto to hold them responsible for human rights violations, crimes against humanity and ecocide. If you are feeling overwhelmed by all the negativity in the world, I want you to know that there are people all over the planet doing wonderful positive work and you can be a part of it!

The summertime buzz...

 

This summer has been a big one so far here at Honey Pie world headquarters.  We opened our new farm store which meant a lot of farm beautification.  We finally finished the outside of our basement which is where our workshop and store are.  It was exposed insulated concrete forms for a few too many years.  This photo shows what it looked like with only the last bit of exposed wall.  It's near the porch and is white with vertical black stripes.  We parged the walls with two coats of lime cement plaster.  This is the first coat.  Next I painted a sign to let people know where we are.  No more being a secret location for us.  It was very exciting the day we actually installed the sign at the end of our lane.  My honey man
sat on top of our van to attach it to the posts.  People keep telling us our sign is too small and they drive right by so we've added a couple of flags to it.  I think I'll make the whole thing bigger one day but for now it's going to have to be enough.  It's been fascinating to see how many people find us anyway.  
We are very touched by the concern that our visitors show for the situation with the bees.  The question on everyone's lips is, "What's happening with the bees?"  We wish we could answer this question but it's a complicated situation.  There has been a lot of media attention on the bees this year and we struggle to keep up with all the information that is out there.  We know that GMOs are not a good thing for bees.  Neither are pesticides.  In Europe there has been a two year ban on neonicotinoid chemicals in order to see if the bees recover.  My feeling is that this isn't long enough to see a full recovery.  If you support the ban of neonicotinoids here's a petition to sign.  Here's another one from Elizabeth May.  We have suffered unusually high winter losses this past year and Gavin has worked very hard to build our hive numbers up again.  We don't know exactly where our bees go but we are careful to position them on farms that are not using GMOs or pesticides.  We can only hope that the bees find enough flowers nearby and don't have to venture into dangerous territory. 

We went to my sister's wedding in Vermont this summer and had a great time with our family.  On an excursion to Brattleboro one day I found this amazing product called Fire Cider.  I love the label art!  It's apple cider vinegar with ginger, horseradish, chilies, garlic and I think some other stuff infused into it.  You take a shot in a glass of water when you're feeling a cold coming on.  If that doesn't chase away a cold I don't know what will!  Vermont has a long tradition of using apple cider vinegar to treat colds and all sorts of ailments.  I didn't buy it because I decided to try making some myself.  I've been using apple cider vinegar in this way for years but never thought of infusing all these other herbs into it.  It's funny because I've been making drinking shrubs for a local restaurant - Agrarian Speakeasy in Bloomfield this year.  I soak fruit, herbs or veggies in vinegar and sugar to make a sweet and tart syrup for cocktails.  The most popular one is rhubarb and ginger in apple cider vinegar.

New this year is a Health Canada ban on citronella in bug spray.  We think this is junk science but are forced to comply.  We've made a new recipe using lavender, cedar, eucalyptus and lemongrass.  It smells great and it works!

We have a brand new tea called Lavender Tea.  I've had a lot of requests for a tea with lavender in it so I came up with this formula which I think is delicious.  I've been enjoying it iced.  It's made with lavender, oat straw, lemon verbena, and mallow.  Oat straw is very tasty and high in calcium.

 

 We've been harvesting honey a lot although it looks like we won't have as much honey this year as we had hoped.  This is a frame of capped honey just about to be uncapped and spun in the extractor.  The lavender honey harvest is in and on the shelves at our farm store, the Brickworks and Green Barns farmers markets in Toronto and at the Prince Edward County Lavender Farm.

We even have a new parking sign - things are getting so official around here.  In this photo you can see the finished parging on the basement.  It looks like it's always been there now. 

















 I'm still photographing bees but I don't limit myself to honey bees now. This is a beautiful bumble bee snuggling into a foxglove flower.

Here's to a New Year - 2013!

It's already the end of January but not too late for me to wish you a Happy New Year!  We have so many exciting plans for the year ahead!  We are finally going to open our farm to the public.  We're fixing up the entrance to our workshop and making a little store here.  I have a sign to paint - something I enjoy doing.  It's beautification time at Honey Pie World Headquarters.  No more living in a secret location for us.  We will have an official Grand Opening in June to celebrate all things honey and herbs.  Activities will include a wild herb walk and a herbal tea party under a tent.  Mini honey pies will be served - hopefully by fairies or maybe children if we can convince them to dress up.  Stay tuned for more details.

Here's the winning photo from my photo shoot of my new greeting cards for our website.  I got my favorite photos of honey bees on flowers made into blank greeting cards.  They've been selling very well - I'm so thrilled!  I'm looking forward to more following the bees around this year. I even made a calendar with the photos and sold out!  This year I'll make the calendar a bit earlier in the year - I had it ready by the end of November but that was a bit late for some people.

This is a shot of my calendar in our booth at the One of a Kind Show.  January's flower is a white aster which has medicinal uses as well.  It was a marathon show as usual but we had fun with it and posted daily photos of our outfits on our facebook page. 












 We have two new flavoured honeys available.  They are Ginger and Chocolate.  They've been getting rave reviews and our always popular Cinnamon honey is starting to feel threatened.  I've been giving out samples of honey at the farmers markets now that we're indoors and the yellow jackets aren't a problem.  People are often confused and then amazed by the idea of flavoured honey.  We don't use any flavourings - just ground organic ginger, cinnamon, cocoa etc. The moisture in the honey releases the flavour of the ground spice and it becomes tastier over time.  I like the ginger honey in a cup of hot lemon and honey.

I love this photo of Hazel playing the electric guitar.  She really knows how to hang around all day in her jammies!

When we're not hibernating in our pajamas we do a bit of sledding in Picton.  This is a popular spot for sledding and pretty terrifying for all of us - in a good way.  The thrill is intense.

The Mysterious Buckwheat Honey

 The honey crop was wonderfully dark and delicious this year.  We've got stacks of buckets of honey waiting to be bottled. This bee is enjoying the nectar of the borage flower  - used in our Blues Tea.

I love the fuzzy stems and leaves of borage - known as the glad herb.  For some wonderful history of the borage plant check out A Modern Herbal.  I took lots of pics of the bees in the borage patch.  One of them made it to our new series of blank greeting cards - available directly from us at markets and fairs. Coming to the website soon!

At last, we have buckwheat honey!  After trying for too many years to admit, we have finally managed to get our second ever crop of buckwheat honey.  The first one was back when we were starting out and worked purely on beginner's luck.  What we have learned over the years is that the flowers of the buckwheat don't have a lot of nectar.  So, if you put your hives on the edge of a field of buckwheat in full bloom in the dark of night and expect the bees to wake up in the morning and get right to work making honey from the strong smelling nectar, you may be disappointed.  The bees, in their infinite wisdom, will choose the best source of nectar they can find, not the closest.  This year because of the drought there was nothing better for them so they went for the buckwheat.  We are delighted to offer this pungent, dark, strong honey.  The buckwheat was grown by the good folks at Cherry Vale Organic Farm just down the road from us.

This is our second year harvesting hazelnuts from our trees.  We planted them about five years ago.  They are beautiful in their husks - like fairy hats.  I would like to make a hazelnut cake with them for Hazel's birthday this year.  They should be cured just in time for her birthday which is Christmas day.

The kids and I had such a great time at Small Pond Arts scarecrow festival.  We made this handsome fellow on a very windy fall day.  Hazel drew the face onto the cloth head before we stuffed it with straw.  You can tell by the orange mouths on the kids they were having fun.  We've enjoyed all the events we've been to at Small Pond, including making shadow puppets, watching a shadow puppet show, Stickfest, Cornography, and just going for a walk in their woods on the art path.

I just couldn't resist snapping a photo of the laundry line full of napkins and tea towels and things with the fall colours looking so beautiful.  The path into our woods is right under the laundry line so I always feel like the laundry is a kind of fluttering banner pointing the way into a magical world.
Our woods is the kind of place you can find giant marshmallows growing, I mean giant puffball mushrooms.  We told Hazel and Rowan we would sell any puffballs they found and they could keep the money.  They sure were excited the day they found about fifteen puffballs between them.  When we sold all but the very biggest ones at market the next day they were even more impressed.

I am raising money to go to Australia!  I've never been there before and when the opportunity presented itself to go to a yoga retreat with some friends I decided to go for it.  So, in order to make this happen I am selling some of my paintings.  I have several that I am willing to part with.  I keep telling myself that I can always make more.  This painting I did in Halifax many years ago in the fall.  It's oil on board, 11"x23", framed - $600.  You can contact me at honeypiehh@hotmail.com if you're interested in this painting or in seeing the other paintings.

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.

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.