Coming soon: e-commerce

Isn’t this exciting! After several false-starts, dead-ends, and a couple of broken promises, we’ll be launching an online store here on the site within the next couple of weeks! Check back here for the announcement or drop us a line here and ask to be added to our email list.

Goodbye, and good riddance, 2018!

Boy, it’s great to see the back-end of 2018! It’s been quiet around here for good reason: we’ve been trying to figure out if we wanted to continue in this business or just pack it in. It’s been that kind of year. Something that we’ve always been proud of is that we’re generally able to keep our losses in the same …

“It is said that smoke calms honeybees”

We don’t use smoke when we tend our hives. We never have and I don’t see any reason to start now. It disrupts the hive and can mask all kinds of odours that a beekeeper can use to figure out what’s happening in a hive. It appears that part of our justification for being smoke-free is also inacurrate: “The perception …

Don’t Plant Those “Bee-Friendly” Wildflowers Cheerios Is Giving Away

I can hear you right now: “What? Why not? Cheerios is doing a good thing! What’s wrong with their wildflower seeds?” Well, mostly nothing, but it’s the invasive ones that would be better off staying inside the packet: Forget-me-not is banned as a noxious weed in Massachusetts and Connecticut, for example. The California poppy is nice in California, but listed as …

Honeybees thieves hit Eastern Ontario

Humans have a tendency to presume that everyone like yourself, who likes the same sports team or has the same interests, is good or should be trusted. Beekeepers, doubly so. Unfortunately, some beekeepers proved just how unworthy they are of that trust this week when they cleaned out an apiary of a dear friend of ours: It was a professional heist. The culprits …

How honeybees do without males

Speaking as a male, I’m not sure I approve of this, but nobody asked. 😉 An isolated population of honeybees, the Cape bees, living in South Africa has evolved a strategy to reproduce without males. A research team has sequenced the entire genomes of a sample of Cape bees and compared them with other populations of honeybees to find out …