Sweet and good for you? Yes please! We headed out to the farm this week to catch up with Tom Wells of Pleasant Valley Apiary in Argyle (who you probably recognize from the Glens Falls Farmers Market!) and find out a bit more about the importance of bees, the benefits of honey, and how it all comes to be (or shall we say bee?!).
How did you get started with beekeeping?
I started beekeeping when I was 16 years old after watching my grandfather catch a swarm of bees from a local tree. I started by just keeping a few hives as a hobby, and continued to learn through taking classes and from fellow beekeepers. As I started producing more, I decided to begin selling the honey wholesale, and as time went on, I began selling to the public at farmers markets and other venues like Taste NY at the Adirondacks Welcome Center.
Today, I have about 105 hives and they’re located on various farms across Washington County. I make around 5,000 pounds of honey per year now.
Let’s get back to the basics for a moment - how is it that bees make honey?!
Bees make honey by collecting nectar from floral blossoms and bringing it back to the hive, where the bees turn the nectar into honey by dehydrating it to a desired moisture content - around 17%.
We’ve all heard the phrases busy bee and worker bee - tell us more about their jobs.
Every bee has a job within the hive. They usually start out as nurse bees who tend to the larvae and feed the young. Then they become house bees, performing tasks like cleaning the hive, removing the dead, building honeycomb, and repairing the hive. They then move up to field bees, where they go to find and collect the nectar.
The typical lifespan of a honeybee is around 3 to 4 weeks in the summer time and up to 6 to 8 months in the winter.
(Pictured above: Can you spot the Queen?)
What does the harvesting process look like?
To harvest the honey, I go out to each apiary (where I keep the hives) and pull off the honey supers, which are the boxes containing the frames for honey production. From there, I take it back to my honey house and uncap it, which removes the top layer of wax and allows the honey to be extracted. It then goes into my extractor and through a pump to a collection tank where it sits for two to three days. This time allows all of the wax particles to come to the top so that they can be scraped off and put back out for the bees to clean.
The honey tastes different based on the blossoms from which the bees have gathered the nectar. I separate the honey from all of my apiaries so that I can have different flavored honey based on each location - for example, blueberry, lavender and wildflower.
(Pictured above: The view from one of Pleasant Valley’s apiaries.)
What are the differences between honey you might get at the supermarket vs. fresh, local honey?
The major difference between store-bought honey and honey produced by us is that the store-bought honey is pasteurized and filtered. Our honey on the other hand, is never pasteurized, never filtered, and is always different because every bucket of our honey has all the goodness that God intended us to eat.
There’s a lot of pride that goes into our honey. We have many customers that will attest that it helps them with their allergies, helps them sleep better, and I’ve even had some of my customers use it in medicinal ways by orders of their doctors and their veterinarians.
We hear a lot about importance of honeybees - tell us more!
Without a honeybee there would be empty grocery stores in every city! There’s not many fruits or vegetables that do not need pollination from the work of a honeybee to survive.
A major challenge for honeybee colonies today is the loss of suitable forage so that the honeybee can have a diverse palette to survive on. The use and improper use of pesticides have also taken a toll. Not very many people realize that the dandelions in your lawn are the first flowers in spring that honeybees use to start their brood rearing.
What are the most rewarding parts of keeping bees? Any challenges?
The biggest challenge of running a business keeping bees is keeping the bees alive throughout the winter. It is awful to have a beautiful colony of bees in the fall only to find them dead in the spring. I do everything that I have been taught to keep the bees alive and to get rid of the Varroa mite - everything that I use to keep these under control are organic in nature.
Speaking of winter, honeybees do not hibernate in the winter. Instead they form a cluster and shiver so that they can keep the hive warm. The inside temperature of a honeybee hive in the winter time is around 93°!
By far the most rewarding aspect of the business is seeing our customers enjoy our honey and come back with great stories to share with my wife, daughter and I as we sell them their next jar.
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Special thanks to Taste NY for making this series possible!
Taste NY at the Adirondacks Welcome Center offers nine state-of-the-art vending machines featuring food, beverages, and gifts from the Adirondack Region and across New York State. Find locally roasted coffee, cold beverages, chips, nuts, snacks, baked goods, milk, yogurt, cheese, ice cream, maple, honey, chocolate, candy, and artisan gifts.
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