home > article > A Hive for the Honeybees

Masher

A Hive for the Honeybees

• by Laura

Okay, so I already mentioned my love of those gazillions of honey bees and bumblebees in my front yard garden.

But I think I’ve got to say a bit more about honey, which I’ve recently fallen for pretty hard. 

It began a few years ago when I went into one of my favorite bakeries here in town and saw a display of honey jars stacked in a pretty golden pyramid.  Turned out that the bakers—Will and Sally—were raising bees in their backyard.  So I bought a bottle to try and took it home. 

Some hours later, standing in the kitchen counter in my boring life, I tasted it and was blown away by the light color and beautiful minty taste.  I’d never experienced anything like it.  Later a beekeeper explained to me that the minty taste came from

Linden trees that the bees visit in spring. 

I got so head over heels that I wrote a lengthy feature about honey in my home state for New Jersey Monthly.

Now of course there is so much to say about honey.  The sheer aesthetics of it.  The story of bees and their secret language.  And the relationship between humans and bees and their honey, which has been going on for thousands of years. 

I was shocked when I researched the article to learn that honeybees pollinate one-third of human crops.  And also shocked to learn about colony collapse disorder which has mysteriously killed huge numbers of bees in recent years.  Scientists say the massive bee die off has probably come from a combination of things:  mites, viruses, and the impact of pesticides.  In essence, the same thing that hurts a lot of us:  stress. 

One upside to the bee despair is that the media made such a huge deal about it that now a lot of people are getting into backyard beekeeping.  And there’s lots of new appreciation for honeybees now.  So here is just a peek at Will and Sally’s two hives, which produce about 160 bottles of glorious honey a year, which they sell at their bakery and farmer’s market stand.

Here are their beehives in their small yard—in a neighborhood that is a lot more Brooklyn than suburban NJ. 

The neighbors were nervous at first but eventually calmed down.  Honeybees are quite docile.

It helps to enclose the hives in a tall fence and to give your neighbors lots of honey. 

When you get “wildflower honey,” it means the bees were allowed to roam and forage for pollen and nectar in whatever flowers they wish.  Honey bees can travel at least a couple of miles from their hive. 

Here you can see some of Will and Sally’s honey, light and dark hued—spring and fall honey. 

If you’d like to see a bit more about how honey gets extracted and produced from a backyard hive, visit my story at NJ Monthly, which has some beautiful photos.  Here’s the link again:  Backyard Gold.

Now go buy some local honey!

Tell a friend about this article: