Plan Bee Honey

Plan Bee Honey

(Why is it different?)

What we don’t do	What we do do
No chemicals in our hives	Wild flowers make the nectar
No chemicals on our land – Plan Bee	We filter the honey with a 600 micron filter
Not pasteurized	We prefer glass to bottle our honey
Not produced with sugar water

No chemicals in the hives – Something most consumers don’t know is that many beekeepers use chemicals in their hives to combat other insect pests that attack honeybees.  While these chemicals target the pests, they weaken the bees.  The chemicals also make their way into the honey.  If you eat honey from chemically treated hives, you are eating chemically treated honey.

No chemical approach - According to our best information, the best protection for a honeybee hive is a strong honeybee hive.  The bees themselves attack their pests and literally drive them out of the hive.  Another natural way to protect bees is to put them in a sunny area (healthy bee environment).  You see the pests don’t like it as hot as bees do.  It only takes a few degrees to keep out the pests and protect the bees. 

No chemicals on Plan Bee – One way to control weeds and pests is through the use of chemicals.  Yep, if you pour chemicals on the land, weeds die, flowers die and bees can die.  Taking this one step further, people can die too.  Don’t believe us, top off your next beverage with your favorite insecticide or herbicide.  I believe they call it suicide.

            No chemical approach on Plan Bee – On Plan Bee we do things differently.  We don’t mow the approximately front 4 acre field.  Instead we just let it grow.  It grows a variety of wild flowers.  We have also introduced other vegetation as well.  We have added lavender, apple, peach, cherry, fig, apricot and pawpaw trees.  We just planted some buckwheat which will produce little white flowers as a cover crop in the fall for our hungry bees.  We don’t spray for clover, we plant it.  The bees love clover flowers.

Not pasteurized – Most honey is pasteurized which means it is heated at 145° Fahrenheit for 30 minutes.  

Why pasteurize? Bakers in particular look for honey that has been heated to a point where enzymatic activity has been destroyed. Enzymatic activity in honey can interact in some products, reducing shelf life. For instance, if raw honey was used in a butter frosting, the enzymatic activity will make the butter turn faster than normal.

The first method for producing whipped honey was patented by Elton J. Dyce in 1935 (U.S. Patent 1,987,893). In this process, raw honey is first pasteurized to kill any yeasts that may be present in the honey.  After pasteurization, previously processed whipped honey is added to the pasteurized honey to produce a mixture of 10% whipped honey and 90% pasteurized honey.  The mixture is then allowed to rest at a controlled temperature of 57 °F (14 °C). This method will produce a batch of whipped honey in about one week.  A seed batch can be made by allowing normal honey to crystallize and crushing the crystals to the desired size.  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipped_honey)

Honey is not recommended for children under the age of 1 because of one medical case years ago traced a case of botulism in an infant to the honey served the night before.  The undeveloped digestive system of an infant could make it susceptible to such toxins.  Unfortunately, the study did not determine how the botulism was introduced to the honey (ie, was something dipped into it?). However, because of this case, the honey industry recommends that children under the age of 1 do not eat honey.

            Not pasteurized honey approach - Raw honey still has enzymes, proteins, and minerals that would be destroyed if honey was heated.  Discerning critics believe raw honey tastes better than heated honey.  Anecdotal evidence says that a spoonful of local honey each day, taken over a series of months, will help build up resistance to allergies. The idea is that the body receives small doses of pollen over a period of time, similar to allergy shots. (Please note: We have not seen scientific studies that prove or disprove this idea, although it is our understanding several studies are underway right now.)  (http://www.beefolks.com/shopcontent.asp?type=faq6) 

“The Revolutionary Effects of Honey on Human Metabolism” (Dr. Ron Fessenden, specialist in honey’s many health benefits and author of The Honey Revolution and other soon-to-be published books on honey and health). Honey is uniquely metabolized in the human body; unlike sucrose, glucose, and high fructose corn syrup, it directly forms liver glycogen, the brain’s main fuel reserve. By keeping the liver glycogen reserve “topped off,” honey is safe for diabetics and also therapeutic. And it helps prevent or eliminate metabolic stress, which can lead to hypertension, diabetes, obesity, heart disease, hypothyroidism, osteoporosis, depression, sleep disorders, Alzheimer's disease, and ADHD in children.

Honey is made from nectar which bees gather from different plants and flowers. Nectar is changed into honey by enzyme action in the bodies of the bees, and is stored in wax cells in the hive. It is then left to ripen, and in time, it thickens because of evaporation caused by the fanning of the bees' wings. Bees produce honey for their own use, as their main source of food. Honey has been in use for thousands of years. A jar of honey, still in perfect condition, was found in an Egyptian tomb, where it was placed over 3,000 years ago. Honey contains an enzyme which prevents it from molding; therefore, it needs no preservatives. Because bees are very sensitive to pesticides, honey is fairly free from contamination; the bees, if exposed to sprays, usually die before returning to the hives. http://www.trivia-library.com/a/information-about-food-honey.htm

Not produced with sugar water –When most consumers think of honey, a picture comes to mind of bees flying from flower to flower gathering nectar and returning to their hive to make honey.  In fact, here is what Wikipedia has to say: (Honey is a sweet food made by bees using nectar from flowers.  The variety produced by honey bees (the genus Apis) is the one most commonly referred to and is the type of honey collected by beekeepers and consumed by humans.  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey)  ) 

             Honey can be produced from sugar water.  It does not have the benefits of pollen and other elements from the flowers.  Bees don’t even have to leave their hives to get it.  The reason some beekeepers would use sugar water could be cost, convenience or environment.  If you have your bee in a location without any bee food, they have to feed them sugar water.  We think this is bad for the bees and bad for people.

            The no sugar water approach (Wild flowers make the nectar) – To be honest we will feed our bees a mixture of sugar, thyme, salt and chamomile tea in the summer if there is no bee food around and AFTER the honey harvest.  Particularly during the honey flow, our bees can find plenty of food.  But during the summer months when everything is past bloom and before the fall/autumn nectar flow, our bees may be hungry.  We carefully examine their nectar stores and if deemed insufficient, we feed them until they can find good bee food again.  Fortunately with a wide open field in a rural setting, they seem to be doing really well.  Therefore, the honey we obtain from our bees is wild flower honey with a unique flavor and color.  It is full of pollen and propolis which is healthy for people.

We filter the honey with a 600 micron filter - Pollen grains vary in shape, coloration and size. The smallest grain of pollen belongs to the alpine forget-me-not, measuring three micrometers. The largest is from the cucumber flower, measuring at around 200 microns.  Read more:

Pollen Grain Size Facts | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/facts_7399786_pollen-grain-size.html#ixzz1T3X63hyZ

If you look at the picture below you will see honey directly from our hive.  The white specs are wax cappings from the end of each honey producing cell.

We use a Hackler Honey Punch which punches little holes in the end of each honey cell.  After the frame is put into the honey extractor, the wax cappings just flow with the honey.  We use the 600 micron filter to remove this wax from the honey.

 That’s it.  We hate to use words like “PURE” but as you can read from our process it doesn’t get much “PURER” than that.

We prefer glass to bottle our honey – Honey does NOT react to glass and like “PURE” water just seems to taste better in glass.  According to our best information, the honey you receive from Plan Bee will last indefinitely. 

Questions to ask of those selling you honey

#1 – Where are your beehives?  I don’t care much where they bottle it but if you are counting on “local honey” you want to know where the hives are. (Ours are located in Liberty, NC)
#2 – Do you use chemicals in your hives?  That’s a yes or no.  (Again, our answer is no.)

Hope this helps and if you have other questions, please reach out to us via email.

SavtasCreations@gmail.com

If you post a neat comment, it might earn you some Plan Bee honey.  Wouldn't that bee a sweet deal.

Like beekeeper Geno says, "Hope to see you by the hive."

Taj Mahal

Naming our outhouse began as a stupid Appalachian Trail joke. Plan Bee is rugged and rural to say the least. We have few amenities save water, picnic shelter and an outhouse. My wife said she could forgo most niceties but insisted on a privy. So once we had begun developing the land, an outhouse moved to the top of the list as a project.

While hiking a section of The Appalachian Trail from Iron Master's Mansion Hostel to Duncannon, PA I spent a night in the Darlington Shelter. Someone had a sick sense of humor like me and had named the outhouse the Taj Mahal. As I pondered our privy while enjoying a little Trail comfort on the throne I decided we had to have the same name for our outhouse.

Taj Mahal @ Darlington Shelter

For those interested in a little history, Taj Mahal was named after a princess in India that died giving birth to her 14th child. Her husband made a promise to his dying favorite wife to never remarry and to build her the richest mausoleum over her grave. The name translates to crown of Mahal. Her name was Mumtaz Mahal or "Jewel of the Palace".

The good news is my Princess is doing fine and my promise to her for this project is complete. It took me a lot less than the 22 years it took Shah(Prince) Jahan. Of course our results are substantially different but then he had the help of 22,000 workers while I had 4.

Finally impacting Plan Bee - 1 year

When we visited Treehouse Vineyard to help trim the grapes vines just before spring, we met an extension agent. In addition to being a very nice guy, he was a wealth of information. As we were trimming away the old dead wood, we discussed our philosophy for Plan Bee. We smiled/smirked as we mentioned that we didn't like using pesticides, herbicides or other cides on the land. We also explained that we wanted all of the vegetation serve a purpose other than appearance. So if we planted a cherry tree, it had better produce cherries and not just ornamental blooms.

Our model is an Israeli model where the vegetation either produces or is removed. Israel, according to Wikipedia, produces 95% of its own food. We shared that in a visit years ago we saw the Bedouin placing sheets beneath olive trees and shaking the trees to harvest the olives. This took place in the streets of Jerusalem. He informed us that we wanted to practice permaculture . So as we think about what we are doing on Plan Bee, we think of it like a giant beehive. All aspects of the land are considered as we plant; remove vegetation; add vegetation and introduce other life.

Below is a Google Map version of our front 4 acres. The reason for the big red dot pointer is I used the shared map option in Hive Tracks to get to our map. If you click on the map, it will enlarge a bit so you can read the 6pt text. The black line in the middle that looks like a magnifying glass is what we are using for a road although it is a bit gravel, a real little bit, and mostly a slightly worn path created by our bee mobile. (Our '99 Saturn) For those technologically inclined, I imported the map from Google into MS Visio and then marked it up with our information from paper files. In order to insert it into this posting I did a Save As a .jpg file. (Ah yes I feel better.) Anyhow, below is the map and we found it cathartic to look at what we have done in a year. We are finally starting to see our impact on Plan Bee.

Picture below is of the entire Plan Bee property.

1st Sting T-Shirt contest - Blog Giveaway

We were accosted in parking lots. We were snickered at by friends.
Finally, we were congratulated for joining the ranks of S3BS (Stung by Bee Beekeeper Society)

So by popular request or out of sheer craziness we have decided to hold a 1st Sting T-Shirt contest.

Here are the rules:

Qualifications:
1. You have to bee a beekeeper. Bee observers are ineligible.

2. The story has to be about your 1st sting.

3. You agree to abide by our capricious/whimsical judging in awarding the men's large T-Shirt

Requirements:
Send in your 1st sting story as a comment to this posting. We will read all that are sent in and let you know how things turned out. We will look at your comments for about 2 weeks or, if possible, until we get tired of reading about other people being stung by bees.

Award:
If your story is the winner of our arbitrary and fickle judging, we will provide you a Men’s large, 1st Edition, bee sting black, with a little bee character, T-shirt and official membership into S3BS (Stung by Bee Beekeeper Society). Good luck and go out and get stung just to get into the contest.

Plan Bee Orchard - Bees need Trees

If you read this month's Bee Culture, you learned that bees are viewed as 6 legged canary's of our environment.

Bee Culture Magazine

Funny thing bees, they don't like pesticides, herbicides or most any other kind of cides.

Funny thing people, we are the same way but just not as smart as the insects we are attempting to tame.

So, we at Plan Bee have been busy planting trees. Our motto, trees need bees and bees need trees. We believe by creating a healthy bee environment, we are also creating a healthy people environment.

One might say, our lives depend on it.

Below is a little diagram of our little orchard. It is located on the north side of our property a short bee flight away from our 3 1/2 hives. I have all of the trees listed with the month and year they were planted and the supplier. We will be replacing about 1/4 of the trees since we planted them as bare root trees and they didn't make it. At $7.00 for bare root trees instead of $49.00 for some our potted trees they were quite the bargain.

Our one really interesting tree story is about Sandy's miracle peach. Last year a friend of my wife's gave her some small peach seedlings. One of the three made it through the dry summer weather of 2010. I was going to pluck it out but sensed it had some green life left in it. With a tear in my eye I told my wife it was still alive and as long as there was any chance I was going to water the little tree. We were so pleased when spring came and the little peach tree began putting forth small purplish leaves. We have called the tree a Miracle Peach as it should have died but made it through. We are hoping for more miracles on Plan Bee.

1st Sting, 2nd Sting now it's Spring

We'll get to the stinging in a moment but let's talk about beeeees and their behavior.  Like so many of our friends, we love studying bees.  We have attended numerous bee schools conducted by PhDs that are educated bug people or as some would say, bug educated people.  The bug of choice is, of course, the honeybee.  We sit around restaurants talking about the mystical little creatures and are constantly trying to understand them.

So, before we visited our little six legged vixens, we hatched a game plan.  You see, it was springtime and those silly bees didn't know what they were supposed to be doing.  When we last saw them, they had moved up to the middle box of their three box world and were huddling to stay warm through the winter.  Now that it was springtime, at least according to the Gregorian Calendar, they should move down to the bottom box.  Alas, they didn't know this because afterall, they are only bees.  Of course they needed a beekeeper to "HELP THEM OUT".

Aleph (right) & Gimmel (left) after adding new boxes

So on the first day of  Spring, we decided to visit our bees on Plan Bee and move their world from the middle box to the bottom box.  When we finished, our Aleph hive, the first hive, would have the colony in the bottom deep box with the middle deep box empty and ready for brood building and the top medium box ready for honey.  Our Gimmel hive, our second hive, which was comprised of a deep and two mediums would be shuffled so that the middle medium would contain brood and the top box honey.  We were ready for them and their little world of boxes and frames were about to be shuffled.

A more seasoned beekeeper than my queen bee and I once sagely stated that "BEES WILL BE BEES".

The big day arrived and after a two hour car ride to our little slice of heaven in Liberty, North Carolina we arrived at Plan Bee and were greeted by swirling flying bees.  The obviously hadn't gotten the word that spring had just arrived and they were to be huddled in the middle of their boxes. As we looked into the hives we discovered that our bees were not just in the middle boxes as they had been with our last inspection but were spread throughout all three boxes.  Their numbers had grown dramatically and we saw pollen, brood and honey everywhere.

HERE COMES THE STINGING

So my queen bee and I have often and publicly announced we have never been stung by our bees.  After all only those less experienced, careless beekeepers that weren't paying attention were stung said I smugly.  Well, someone forgot to tell the bees that I alone on the planet was not to be stung.  So as I plied my trade of  scraping burr comb and brood from Gimmel and placing it on a bench nearby, a pesky bee crawled up on my shoe and stung me though my sock.  I winced in disbelief. 

GET THAT SMILE OFF YOUR FACE

I did remember to pull the stinger immediately and kept on going.  My queen bee was not so fortunate.  She bravely stood where no beekeeper should stand, in front of the hive.  My fault.  To be more exact, with her derrière sideways to incoming bees.  Everyone knows that bees cannot sting through blue jeans right??

SOMEONE FORGOT TO TELL THE BEES

So my poor wife winced at her sting and as we discussed the solution we agreed that dropping trow in front of the hive to remove one stinger was NOT a good solution.  Being a woman, she endured the pain until the appropriate time and removed the stinger from the INSIDE of her blue jeans.

So what did we learn class?

I would suggest the old adage of Bees will be Bees seems to ring true. If you have some other clever adage you feel would apply, please feel free to submit your comment.  Please note we do have to approve them and while our egos have been damaged, we still love our bees and are now officially part of S3BS.

(Stung By Bee Beekeeper Society)

Learning about vineyards and nut trees for Plan Bee & bees

As we ponder what we want to put on Plan Bee for us and the bees, my queen bee thought a vineyard would be great. 

WE KNOW NOTHING ABOUT VINEYARDS.

The old expressions goes "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread."  We aren't angels so I guess I know what that makes us.  My queen is a wide reading and researching machine and it wasn't long before we were members of the NC Muscadine Grape Association.  Yep, we looked on line and discovered that that a scant week away the NCMGA was holding a meeting at Gregory Vineyards and if we would get up early we could attend the all day event.  So we did.

Beeing Beekeepers we have discovered something interesting about people.  There are horse people, bee people, football people and grape people.  Some of the groups mingle well with others and well, some don't.  If you are a grape person and make wine, most everyone loves you except the AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) people.

As we stood in the midst of grape people and thought oh goodie we have bees and surely every plant loving person on the planet felt the same, we were, how shall we say, educated. Grape people are not real fans of bee people as many of their grapes are hermaphrodites, they prefer the term self-polinating.  It also turns out that many grape people spray their grapes with a fungicide every two to six weeks.  Most spray an herbicide below the grapes to keep the grass and weeds down.

Pause--  So let's see.  We spray a grape friendly version of roundup underneath the grapes which is sucked up by the 2 - 6 " deep roots to the leaves, then to the grapes and finally to your glass of wine. Yum!

We also heard about all of the spraying done for insects except near harvest time and the chemical companies are actively working to reduce the window of time between spraying and harvesting.  More time, more spray.  Still liking those grapes?

Cute factoid about grapes -  They should be planted North South so as to maximize the sun on the fruit.
Cute factoid about bees - Hives should face Southeast so they would be roughly lined up with the grape rows/vineyard.

Muscadine grapes are native to the Carolinas and can require no spray depending on how your want to run your vineyard.  Our great Grape orientation will be to worry about bees first and grapes second.  Whatever grape juice/wine we eventually get will be "gravy" or is that grape juice.  Oh, well.

So we will plant our little north south rows of muscadine grapes with clover beneath them to keep the weeds down knowing that some of the vitality of the grapes will be sacrificed to the clover.  Our bees will enjoy the clover and the grape blossoms, we hope.  Sounds like we are creating bee heaven to me.

Above is the first layout proposed by our Land Planner, Brandon Price of Wildland Forestry.

http://www.wildlandforestry.com/

Note that the little grape  vineyard is lined up with a Northwest/Southeast orientation.  In our next pass we will change the proposed layout to reflect our great grape knowledge.

Nuts - A Quick word on this before I end this post.  Turns out that trees like Pecans don't share well with other plants.  At a gardening class, I know we spend too much time in classes on this stuff, we learned that trees like pecans really diminish the growth of other plants underneath them.  It is unwise to use their leaves when composting because of the chemical in the leaves.  When we plant our pecan trees, which have a 30' reach, we will plant them where we don't want anything else to grow.

Sure hope my bees like all of the trouble my wife and I are going through to provide them a nice place to live.

Final thought,

WE KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT VINEYARDS
& NUTS NOW