Onward past the Ides

-Posted by Isaac

Some days are diamonds.

We’ve had a few of those haven’t we?

Thinking about the miserable March of 2018, I certainly can’t complain about this year.

On warm days, we’re out. On cold days we’re out.

On the rainy days, we find things to do inside.

In between all this shifty March weather, we get wind.

It’s been pretty intense this year, as some of us have seen close up. The hay barn just outside Darbyville lost its roof.

And Mt. Sterling’s iconic restaurant took a beating.

I remember the last hurricane force winds that ripped through town a few years ago. A big chunk of roof was taken off the same building. I listened the next day as the news was so relevant it made the afternoon talk on AM 610. The late great John Corby commented, “If Ben and Joy’s ever gets taken out, I’ll tell ya, that whole town might as well hang it up.”

Well, keep smiling John, wherever you are. I’m happy to say Mt. Sterling is standing solid, Ben and Joy’s is still kicking, proudly serving up green marshmallow fluff in the eternal lunch buffet. Climate change has thus far proven no match for the Angel Room.

The night of the nastiest winds took a couple lids off our hives here at home. I went out with a flashlight and placed them back, but it made me think… I’d better make it around to check on everybody. The next day, sunup to sundown, I visited almost everybody. About 500 hives. Even though I only found three more lids blown off, it was worth the trip. It gave me a chance check on the girls one final time before we start our April splitting.

If a hive is marked with the brick on edge, it’s big enough to make a split. (To make a nuc or two.) Much to my delight, about 90% are splittable.

And even better, I’d say at least 50% look like this:

A hive like this will make a nuc or two in April and go on to produce a box or two of spring honey in May. (Fingers crossed.) It’s awesome! A complete turnaround from the way things looked last March.

But for now, the weather’s still cold and the many many mouths require ever more calories to make that final push into spring. We burned through our third pallet of winter patties this week.

It won’t be long though. On the good days, the girls are making it out and actually finding what mother nature is serving up. Bill Huhman, our county bee inspector got a closeup of one of his girls loaded with what we think is maple pollen.

The willows will soon follow. Then the deadnettle, the chickweed, the dandelions, and… everything else. Just a few more days!

For now, we cheat. On the nice days our girls here at home have themselves a gluttonous picnic.

Collecting, cleaning, and selling pollen has its benefits— buckets of dust. A winter’s worth of pollen dust provides the bees with hours of snacking and gives us some good cheap entertainment to boot.

Something New - Ginger Lime Infused Honey

-posted by Jayne

There’s a new honey on the block….

And no… i did not pose that little bee on the tag the day I took the photo. She wandered into the photo shoot by her own accord.

For the past few years at the farmers market, our regular customers occasionally wander up to the booth, try a few samples, look at us and question, “Anything new?” The answer, for the past several years has been (with a smile) … “No… nothing new.”

“Same old, same old”.

“We just try to stay consistent, offer what we have, what the bees produce.”

“Oh yeah, we do have these two varieties of infused honey, Lemon Verbena and Lavender.”

(We know! Old news!)

When I pondered my New Years Resolutions for 2019, I decided it was time to try something new. Customers wanted it! Infusions are fun and not difficult, right? Just a little creativity, some time, a little elbow grease working up new labels, jars, photos, product descriptions for the website, advertising on Facebook and Instagram. It’s really not that hard, is it?

Little did I know, one of our favorite Meadmakers in Columbus (proudly brewing with Honeyrun Farm Honey) already makes a Ginger Lime Mead - Copper Knob. They had even gifted us a bottle back in December - it was delicious! Maybe I subconsciously borrowed their idea?

Our Ginger Lime Infused honey has a warm, spicy, citrusy flavor that is great in hot tea, mixed drinks, on chicken or stir fry, or even on cornbread or biscuits. 

For those that lack the creativity to come up with their own recipe, I’ll leave a few tried and true recipes below.

Stir-Fried Honey-Ginger Chicken with Peppers

Ingredients

• 1/4 cup Ginger Lime Infused honey

• 2 tablespoons rice vinegar

• 2 tablespoons soy sauce

• 2 tablespoons vegetable oil

• 1 pound boneless, skinless chicken breasts or thighs, sliced into 1/4-inch strips

• 1/4 cup minced peeled fresh ginger

• 2 garlic cloves, minced

• 3 red, orange, or yellow bell peppers (ribs and seeds removed), thinly sliced

• Cooked rice, for serving

• Fresh cilantro leaves, for serving

Directions

1. 1. In a small bowl, stir together honey, vinegar, and soy sauce. Heat a large skillet over high until hot. Add 1 tablespoon oil and swirl to coat skillet. Add chicken and stir until opaque but not cooked through, about 3 minutes; transfer to a plate.

2. 2. Add 1 tablespoon oil, ginger, and garlic to skillet and stir until fragrant, 30 seconds. Add peppers and stir 2 minutes. Add soy mixture and bring to a boil. Return chicken to skillet and toss until sauce thickens and chicken is cooked through, about 3 minutes. Serve over rice, topped with cilantro.

   -recipe adapted from www.marthastewart.com

For those that prefer a simpler recipe such as a mixed drink or mocktail:

BOURBON AND HONEY GINGER FIZZ

INGREDIENTS

• Ginger Lime Infused Honey Syrup

• 1/2 cup honey

• 1/2 cup water

• Bourbon and Honey Ginger Fizz

• 1.5 ounces bourbon whiskey

• 2 teaspoons Ginger Lime Infused Honey Syrup

• 1 teaspoon fresh lemon juice

• 2 ounces club soda

INSTRUCTIONS

1. In a 1-quart saucepan, mix honey and water. Heat about 2 minutes over low heat, stirring constantly until honey is dissolved. Remove from heat; set aside 1 hour to cool. Pour syrup into glass jar, cover and refrigerate until needed. Makes about 1 cup. You may also add extra chopped ginger to this step if you’d like to make it more spicy.

2. In a cocktail shaker filled with ice, mix bourbon, Ginger Honey Syrup and lemon juice.

3. Shake until well chilled. Strain into ice filled glass. Add club soda. To make a “mocktail” version of this drink, simply leave out the whiskey and add a bit more club soda, a bit more syrup to suit your taste.

Recipe adapted from https://www.bourbonandhoney.com/bourbon-and-honey-ginger-fizz/

We have a limited batch of our Ginger Lime Infused Honey and once it is sold out, that’s it! (For a limited time at least). We already have our next infused dreamed up and we’re excited to share it with you! For now, we hope you’ll enjoy trying out the Ginger Lime Infusion- and please comment below if you have any great recipes to share with us! Our Ginger Lime Honey is on sale right now- so get it while you can! https://www.honeyrunfarm.com/purerawhoney/gingerlimehoney

Father and Son

-Posted by Isaac

It’s been a week of messing around with wood.

The fence building continues, and when the weather finally turned, we made lots of entrance reducers for bee pallets.

Let me tell you, a little warmth sure makes things more enjoyable.

On hump day we had the week’s most momentous event.

My Baby turned five on March 4th (Talk about a fitting date.) And two days later, Mason turned 11. Cakes were made, compliments of our lovely and multitalented Katie in the honey house.

It’s extremely easy to find great pics of Eden. My Baby can ham it up.

She’s gregarious and lovable. A strong personality, a small body, a big smile. Pictures come naturally. Especially if you capture one baby with another. You’ve got a winner.

But Mason, our oldest, is quite the opposite. Introverted and quiet, broody, somewhat awkward, a weird sense of humor, a cool, standoffish demeanor. Not unpleasant, but definitely not magnetic.

He’s got very little interest in baby animals, or the world beyond, and absolutely zero interest in what his dad does. This could change of course, but for now, he prefers to live in his own world.

He reminds me of the 11-year-old me.

“Smile Mason… it makes you feel good!”

Ok. I’ll assume you’re smiling…

Every Tuesday and Thursday I drop him off at Musical Mustangs, a hour before school. It’s always a very quiet ride. I have a lot to say, and usually pummel him with questions for the first minute or two. Then I give up, and feeling frustrated, turn on the NPR news… might as well overdose with frustration.

Mason wants to arrive ten minutes early so he can read a book.

He’s a big reader. Of Captain Underpants.

Here he is getting all psyched up about his big game on Saturday—

I’ve had the ‘joy’ of assistant coaching his basketball team for two years in a row. It’s almost comical how little he cares about the sport… and how good he is. He can easily hang with the other kids when he decides to. It’s just that the deciding to try, to be normal, is somewhat of an intermittent thing.

Much like Melville’s Bartleby, the mantra of his life seems to be, “I would prefer not to.”

He ignores people. He’s unaware. And he simply refuses to suffer fools gladly. I love him so much. Like I said, I see so much of me in him. I think about my own teens and twenties and I realize he’s coming up on a tough couple of hard-knock decades. At 11, the kid years start to fade away. If you want to make it a smoother ride, you’ve got to learn to fake it. To be agreeable. You’ve got to take some social cues. Nod and pretend to listen to a coach. Smile and say hello to a classmate. Look an adult in the eyes. Learn how to hold a fork… There are so many things! I’ve tried, believe me. It seems to fall on deaf ears. Or am I one of the fools he refuses to suffer gladly?

I was thinking about all this, and an old Cat Stevens song came to mind.

There are two lines in that song that really hit home. Well, maybe three. I had to laugh about the “Find a girl, settle down…” Mason, following my own trajectory, won’t even know what a girl is until he’s in his twenties. He’ll then go through about a decade of awkward heartache until someone takes pity on him. Then maybe he’ll settle down, like his old man.

The obvious line was, “How can I try to explain, when I do, he turns away again.” I feel this almost daily with my son. And I wonder if it was the same with my own father? My dad took took to calling me ‘the professor’, due to my hair-brained, bookwormish and spacey way of going about things. I was never sure of what to think of that. Is it a compliment? Or an insult? I never asked, I ignored it. Like the song says, I turned away.

Another line that got me was, “You will still be here tomorrow, but your dreams may not.” What exactly Cat Stevens was getting at, I don’t know. But I took it as… Hey buddy, you better adjust, you better learn to fake it, or your future opportunities will tend to limit themselves. I know this all too well. Like me, it’s looking like Mason will have a hard time of it.

Society welcomes the well-adjusted. And even those born somewhat ill-suited to the world seem to learn to fake it. They adjust. The teachers, the preachers, the lawyers, doctors, nurses, dentists, sales people, bartenders, barbers, mechanics, etc.. They all have to smile and be nice. They all put up with fools. Some even relish it— look how many people spend their day on Facebook.

It makes me sad and happy at the same time. Thinking about Mason. I both worry and rejoice. He’s a little me! Instead of winking, I tend to sigh and say, ‘He’s a chip off the old block.’ Then I laugh. I love it!

I probably worry too much. He’ll find his way. Here he is just a few days ago— soloing at the Musical Mustangs concert!

Talent and brains and enormous potential hide under that thick, awkward shell. And, you never know, maybe he won’t even need to learn to fake it. He may just wind up a beekeeper.

With a little help from my friends

-Posted by Isaac

Lend me your ears and I’ll sing you a song…

A strange man with a strange instrument. What a market treat! I think he must’ve tired of my questions because he finally just grabbed a crate, sat down and said, “Well… let me show you…”

He entertained us for the next half an hour. And he probably helped the honey sales. You just never know who’ll come along to get you through.

And that’s what this post is about—the ones helping me to stomach this last bitter stretch of winter. I think I’d be lost without them. Because let me tell you, it’s not easy to wake up to snow on March 1st… especially after the maples have bloomed and we’ve had three beautiful days of t-shirt weather.

I looked outside, felt disgusted, looked at the weather app on my phone, felt even more disgusted. More snow on Sunday, a high of 17 on Tuesday!

But I’ve learned something… it’s ok to start disgusted. In fact, I do all the time. (Especially if I check my news feed.)

The day can turn around. You can turn things around! And your friends can help.

If winter isn’t going to relinquish, we’d better go after more firewood. Gavin helped me with a couple loads this week.

Just look at that hustle!

Bridger, my Dapper Dan man, helped me by just being himself.

And Maizy brought her little buddy out for a visit as I plugged away on the new fence.

It’s nice to be reminded of why I’m spending all this time and money.

And of course, speaking of time and money, we’ve got the bees to worry about.

My many many friends. My labor of love. They’re hanging on, they’re growing and brooding up, and they’re hungry!

Eden helped me finish the second round of feeding.

She’s fearless. She’s determined.

Not only the bees… she helps me to hang on.

We plowed through the second pallet of feed, and had to order another.
And look who showed up to start on that third pallet— long lost Seth!

Notice he wore his military fatigues to remind us… he still belongs to Uncle Sam. But it sure was nice to visit. I never tire of Seth’s special brand of introspective philosophy.

We knocked out 11 yards in just a few hours. Amazing what you can accomplish with good help. I begged him to stay another day, but just like the Seth of old, he had girls and adventures to attend to.

And now he’s back overseas. Conquering Italy this spring.

Having previously conquered France last fall.

Going into winter, looking at the bees and their honey stores, I was thinking that it would only be a two pallet winter. But I was wrong, wasn’t I? They ate a little more than expected. A welcome expense. At least it’s not the six pallet winter we had a few years back. Here’s a sensible little rhyme for you penny pinching March beekeepers: Better fed than dead.

It’s March. And it’s still cold. But the bees are looking great and the end is in sight. Hard to believe, but in less than a month we’ll be making our first splits.

Sometime within the next six weeks I’ll be standing out there in a t-shirt. Some gorgeous purple evening, I’ll look out over a field of nucs.

I’ll crack a beer, maybe fire up the grill, soak up the sweet scent of spring grass, watch the deadnettle, the dandelions, the daffodils, listen to baby chicks and baby ducks, think about baby bees and Easter eggs…

…and I’ll give the memory of this (expletive, #%&#, expletive) winter the good cussing it deserves.

We’ve made it, my friends! We’ve made it!

Thanks for all the help!

The greatest post that never was

-Posted by Isaac

Boy, did I have a good one for you this week.

First I was going to get you laughing at that goofy picture of Bridger trying to ride a goat.

You see, we’ve been building a lot of fence lately. The idea being, maybe someday we’ll have something in here besides goats. Maybe something a little bigger to ride.

When you’re building a fence, specifically on the most miserable few days of the year, digging postholes one after another after another all day long, there’s little to do but think. The machine was too loud to listen to podcasts. The job itself, too simple to mandate attention.. why not plan out a great blog post?

I mean, I’ve got all these thoughts hammering around.

Just look at that desolate sky, that impoverished grass.

Remind you of anything? A famous Andrew Wyeth maybe?

Sure, I’ve replaced Christina with a Bobcat skid steer loader, but don’t tell me that’s not art.

So the idea was to artfully connect my posthole digging horizons to my feelings about Christina’s World, then metaphorically associate those ominous thoughts with current events. (All after starting with goofy Bridger riding the goat.) I wanted to start you out laughing and then soon have you crying.

The next phase was designed to piss you off.

This week’s big current event was the good people of New York sending mighty Amazon packing.

Hey Bezos, take your 25,000 jobs and shove it!

Which I thought was awesome, but it sure pissed off a lot of people. And maybe I’m wrong, but I’m assuming that you’re part of that pissed off throng. I’ve talked to a few angry people this week. How dare those New Yorkers! Don’t know what’s good for them…

Am I completely alone on this? The one and only midwestern voice of dissent? Is it really ok for a company to skirt three billion dollars in taxes?? How dare those New Yorkers?…How dare they what? Expect to be able to get to work??

(No, you’re right… I don’t know all the details… but I still think it’s awesome. Definitely a non-bootlicking move.)

So I was planning to rile you by trying to be the lone voice of reason, then maybe bring you back around with some Springsteen.

…asking you to particularly pay attention to those last few lines… and maybe see the great “philanthropy” of Amazon in a different light.

And while I had you wavering, I was going to hit you with a favorite quote from my favorite author/farmer.

While you chewed on all that, I was going to covertly declare myself a Bernie lover.

And really piss you off.

Then switch it up, and say whoa, wait a minute, I’m just kidding! I’m a capitalist! Look at what I do. Besides, I would never align my doctrine with an admitted socialist. Blasphemy!

Having taken you for a ride— laughing, crying, reflective, pensive, pissed, confused, wavering, maybe illuminated…

…but maybe just pissed again— I was going to finish it with the assurance that I’m still a true red blooded American business owner. A capitalist through and through. A good and wholesome capitalist beekeeper still on the home team to the very last drop of honey.

Most likely you’d still be pissed.

And that’s why I decided against it. A blog post like that is not only dangerous, it’s hard work. Not to mention, way over the head of a beekeeper.

Jayne thought my little nap was Instagram worthy. (Little did she know, I fell asleep planning the greatest blog post ever.)

But alas, I awoke, and came to my senses— You, the good, honest, hard working, (and highly intelligent) folks who read this are looking for kids riding goats. Stick with kids riding goats, dummy! It was a good start to a post that would’ve turned into a train wreck.

And oh yeah— bees. Stick with bees!

Thankfully, before I could lay all this on you, Ohio beekeeper Peggy Garnes saved me by sharing a bee article.

I was fortunate enough to hear Bret Adee speak last October. What a great great man… who has been put through the meat grinder.

It’s a short and depressing article if you choose to read it. And here you go… why not another song? You know, to set the mood for reading.

It could have been the greatest post ever. Or, more likely, it could’ve been a jumbled pile of spaghetti. Lucky for you, I’ll just leave you with some unnerving bee world thoughts. And more questions—

Who are those wolves? What are those wolves? Varroa mites? Farm chemicals? Hard luck? Corporations? Governments? The whole system?

How about another quote to finish up. Another from the Great One—

And yet another question— Are we living in Christina’s World?