Our Honey
Honey Grove honey is a labour of love, on the part of the bees and the beekeepers. Most people do not know that it takes one bee her whole lifetime to create one teaspoon of honey. It has been said throughout the ages that honey is a holy substance, a sweet alchemy, a medicine, a magical elixir. It is the sweetness of summer distilled and infused with the essences of the bee and the flower.
For Rudolph Stiener (Austrian philosopher and biodynamic agriculturist/ beekeeper) honey was the result of love; made manifest by the bee’s love affair with the flower, the unity of the masculine and feminine.“The whole beehive is permeated with life based on love. The bee lives as if it were in an atmosphere pervaded thoroughly by love. The bee sucks nourishment, which it makes into honey, from the parts of a plant that are steeped in love life.” (From the Book Bees, Lectures by Rudolf Stiener.)
Organic Beekeeping Methods
Here at Honey Grove we are devoted to the most holistic practices. As a small apiary we are able to concentrate our attentions on the needs of each individual hive. Once established, a hive stays in its designated garden and unlike many commercial beekeepers we do not ship our bees out to pollinate chemically sprayed GM mono-crops.
We are also proud to say that we do not use antibiotics for disease prevention. Our approach to honeybee health is Integrated Pest Management, meaning we do a number of non-invasive practices throughout the beekeeping year to reduce the stress levels in the hive and to keep mite counts down.
Bee Forage
Thousands of flowers are grown on Honey Grove throughout the year with the sole intention of creating abundant and varied forge for our bees. Our aim is to create a landscape that can fully sustain its bee population. At the end of the honey harvest we leave our bees with as much honey as we can, this helps to avoid the supplemental feeding of sugar syrup. When we are required to feed sugar syrup, we enrich the syrup with herbal biodynamic tea blends that support the over-all health and wellness of our bees.
We hope you enjoy Honey Grove Honey as much as we do, and as you savour its sweetness, know that you are tasting the landscape from which it came. Recall that one bee spent her whole life gathering enough nectar to give you one spoonful of sweetness. Contemplate that this sweetness came for the nectar that rose up into the center of a flower, where it was ingested by a bee, and transformed into the sweet liquid gold that sits upon your tongue.