Tag: Hereford Farmers Market

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We’re back at the Hereford Farm Market!

Every Saturday from May until November, we’ll be at the Hereford Farm Market from 9:00 a.m. until noon. We share a table with Mandi and Rob (Rosie Posie Design Co). Mandi sells hand-knitted accessories, mug rugs (beautiful one-of-a-kind coffee coasters), and other fiber artisan offerings.

Look for us at the “Hats & Honey” table near Contented Rooster’s pop-up pastry shop.

Why “Hats & Honey” when we have neither hats nor honey to sell?? Possibly because I’m the worst marketer EVER. Possibly because I’m ignoring everything anyone has ever said about branding best practices. But, in truth, it’s because people at the market know us as the “Hats & Honey” table and we have a sentimental attachment to our table banner. (We will have both hats & honey in the fall!!)

While Craig and I wait for our little bees to finish making honey, we’re selling other fun bee- and honey-themed products, as well as homemade jam. Here’s what’s available from Windtree Bee this month:

HONEY CINNAMON ALMOND GRANOLA

Limited quantities! I’ll probably make this once or twice a month, just to take a break from jam batches, which are much more labor intense. These are 16 oz jars, but dry weight is about 2 cups. Except for the almonds, salt, and honey, all the ingredients are organic. Smelled awesome while baking. Like a fresh batch of cookies!! 🙂

HONEYCOMB SUNCATCHERS

St. Gobnait, Patron Saint of Bees and Beekeepers

My sister-in-law’s mom, Mary Nolan, is a glazier. She has a basement studio where she makes bespoke stained glass. This spring, she made six beautifully handcrafted bee and honeycomb suncatchers. The one above is my favorite.

BEE BALM AND GARDNER’S SOAP

Made from our beeswax!

My next-door neighbor, Tammy Tracey, makes homemade soaps, body scrubs, and beeswax salves. We gave her a bucket of beeswax from our hives and she used it to make a lavender-scented hand cream and a rich, dense nighttime balm, which is great for winter eczema. She also makes a strong gardener’s soap with pumice and tea tree oil — useful after possible poison ivy encounters!

HOMEMADE JAM

  • Small batches
  • Unique flavors
  • Often made with organic and/or local ingredients

I’ve had a lot of fun coming up with new flavors each week. For Preakness Saturday, I made a batch inspired by the horses. “Midnight Bourbon” Maple Apple Butter sold out almost immediately. “Risk Taking” is My Jam (a caramel apple coffee jam) followed soon after. I have one — one!! — jar of “Keepmeinmind” for Grilling left. It’s a smoky-spicy savory apple-based jam that is a terrific compliment to grilled pork or chicken.

I also have a few carrot cake and cinnamon pear jams and a half-dozen mixed berry jams left. Mixed berry (raspberry, strawberry, blackberry, and blueberry) is a classic summer jam, so I made a double batch last week. Check back each week for new flavors!

Flower Update:

Everything is in the ground! Mostly. I held some of my sunflower seeds back. I’ve never been successful at succession planting, but it’s always fun to try. Our old garden fence was falling down, so Craig built a new one. Our spruced up garden with all the newly planted little rows of seedlings must have looked very enticing to one of the neighborhood’s wild rabbits. He (or she) chomped off the tops of several seedlings. I was just about to go all Mr. McGregor when I caught my younger daughter carrying a sack of carrots out to the garden in the hope that she could coax the rabbit out. Hmm… Stay tuned…

Bee & Honey Update:

Thank you to everyone who has stopped by our table to ask about the bees. The hives look good! Well, most of them. One hive probably has a laying worker, but we’ll probably let nature run its course and see what’s what with that hive in a month. In the meantime, Craig took on some additional beekeeping work looking out for another hive on a nearby farm. And we met some other local beekeepers who sell nucs only a few miles from us, which is great! We have neither the interest nor the acreage to try to sell nucs, so it’s nice to find a convenient source for Hereford-hardy bees!

Hope everyone is enjoying the cicadas and the start of summer! See you at the market!

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Selling Season + Winterizing the Hives

Craig harvested about the same amount of honey as last year (roughly 120 pounds). I was hopeful for a bit more because we had one more hive this year, but… bees, ya know? Totally unpredictable – at least that’s been our experience with backyard beekeeping. (We don’t claim to know how the big commercial beekeepers/honey producers operate and, in fact, aren’t advocating for that type of practice. We both continue to think that beekeeping is best for bees if done on a small scale.)

So, we jarred up this year’s harvest and started selling. It’s been fun!

We’re selling at these places this year:

OAK SPRING FARM STORE: Tuesdays from 2:00-6:00

HEREFORD FARMERS MARKET: Saturday, September 21st from 9:00-12:00 (possibly additional Saturdays)

HEREFORD FALL FEST: October 19th (10-5) and October 20th (10-6)

Craig and his friend, Chuck, are also offering another free “Intro to Beekeeping” class at:

PERRY HALL LIBRARY: September 28th from 2:00-3:00

BEE REPORT

We decided to keep our little nuc instead of over-wintering it at a friend’s house, so now we’re up to four hives. I think that will be our max. As stated above, we’re not looking to go big. We’ll see how many make it through winter. For now, they’re looking good!

Winterizing the Hives

Here’s a neat thing about bees – they are super tidy. They like to keep their hive clean and will also clean any honey-covered equipment you leave in the yard for them.

After harvesting, we put the supers and buckets outside for a few days so the bees can clean them. Here are some other common things beekeepers do to prepare for winter:

HIVE CHECK UP: Basically, beekeepers want their hives as healthy as possible before heading into winter. This means assessing the strength of the queen, estimating how many bees are in the hive, seeing how much honey they have left, and checking for problems.

FEEDING: We try to leave lots of honey in the hives for our bees, but some beekeepers (us included) occasionally feed sugar water to their bees after the harvest to give them an extra calorie boost heading into winter.

TREAT FOR VARROA: Varroa mites are like vampires to bees. They suck a bee’s insides out while also probably infecting it with a virus. Lovely, huh? Varroa are pests whose full scientific name is varroa destructor for a reason. A varroa infestation can easily wipe out an entire hive and spread to another hive very quickly. But you don’t want to treat for varroa before the harvest, which means it’s usually a fall task.

ENTRANCE REDUCER: Once summer is over, there are less bees, making less trips. To help the bees keep their hives warm in the winter, and to keep out intruders like mice, beekeepers sometimes install “entrance reducers.” You have to be careful about using them though, because if the bees are still too active, the entrance can get clogged with bees and the whole hive will die. (Yep, that happened to us one year. Always heartbreaking when you lose a hive, no matter the cause. Doubly bad when you feel like it was something you did.)

VIVALDI BOARDS: These are specially built frames that help with winter moisture, ventilation, and feeding problems. We’ve never used them before, but this year Craig made them for all our hives. (Every year, our goal is to have ALL OF OUR HIVES SURVIVE. Will this be the year?) Click here for a link on how to make these yourself.

Craig has been beekeeping since 2015. Jill started selling honey in 2018. Currently, they have four winterized hives and a flower garden that needs to be put to bed. Their latest experiment: Vivaldi boards. Stay tuned…