Harvest

Want a taste of Wallyhood’s own Hive Mind Honey?

As long-time readers know, we’ve been keeping bees here in our Wallingford backyard for the past 15 years, give or take. We had to make a few adjustments recently, though, what with Baby Z running around out (it turns out toddlers and grab-level bee hives make a poor mix). So we headed down to the Rusty Rack Guys and picked up some used warehouse palette racks to pop the hives up off the ground and out of reach.

It worked out well on a number of counts: not only does having the apiary 12′ up in the air mean Z can’t go poking his little fingers where they’ll get stung, but bees tend to follow an “up and across” flight path out of their hive. Since they tend not to drop down, bbq’s are a bit of a more sedate affair these days, as well.

As a bonus, the palette rack infrastructure underneath the hives made for the perfect scaffolding for a chicken coop. Check out the whole apparatus to the right.

But back to the story at hand, and how you can taste the bounty.

It was a tough year for beekeepers in this area. No, Colony Collapse Disorder, the much feared plague of honey bees, hasn’t made it up to the Pacific Northwest yet (and probably won’t, the climate seems to preclude it). Instead, whatever combination of warmth and cool we had seemed tuned to cause the bees to swarm: half the hive picks up one day and heads off in a big cloud to find a new home, leaving beekeepers such as myself to mourn their relatively empty hives. Across my three hives, I had three separate swarms (thought likely two were from the same hive) and I talked to other apiarists who had similar experiences.

Nonetheless, one hive worked hard and strong for the first half of the season, and I upgraded from two hives to three, so I had more to work from, resulting in my best harvest to date: 182 lbs of honey, filling 16 gallons of buckets.

Want some? Sure you do! If you’ve got flowers in Wallingford, it’s sure bet that some of the pollen from those flowers have made it into that honey, so you’ll have a little bit of your own golden harvest to drizzle on your toast or to sweeten your coffee.

We’ll be giving away pint jars at various times over the next few months as the mood strikes us (and we’ll probably do a fundraiser for local charities with them as we have in past years), but for right now, we want to start off by offering a free jar of Wallingford’s own Hive Mind Honey to two Facebook Wallyhood fans who “Like” this article.

We’ll choose two at random on Wednesday evening, so if you want in, you have until then to a) “Like” the Wallyhood Facebook page and b) “Like” this article on Facebook (click the word “Recommend” at the bottom of this article or on our Facebook page).

Don’t worry, if you’re not on Facebook, we’ll be giving away more to regular blog readers soon.