Bees

10 Sep 2010 4 Comments

We’ve got them and they give us honey. Well, actually we steal their honey. Have you ever heard of sourwood honey? Me neither. Until we moved here. Sourwood trees grow in this part of the Blue Ridge Mountains. It’s quite a delicacy, and the prices I’ve heard quoted are up to $23 a quart at festivals. We have 3 hives, started this year with 2 but caught a swarm. It’s not as exciting as it sounds because it was a swarm of our own bees. I’ll post about that later as we have some photos of that most exciting day. I’ll also post about getting started in beekeeping at some point because we frequently get questions about that.

4 Comments (+add yours?)

Tracy
Sep 10, 2010 @ 07:49:41

Is sourwood what gives your honey it’s tropical flavor? I know of three people who’ve tried this year’s crop and they’ve all made similar remarks. Honey is so exciting!

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- Connie
  Sep 10, 2010 @ 13:18:09
  
  The honey you have is our Spring honey, taken off before the sourwood trees started blooming. I think the Spring honey tastes like apricots. We did a taste test of six different kinds and this year’s Spring came out #1.
  
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Claire
Sep 10, 2010 @ 16:13:42

What were the other five kinds of honey in the taste test?

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- Connie
  Sep 10, 2010 @ 16:18:12
  
  We tasted honey from 2 different hives of our sourwood harvest, a friend’s Spring honey from 2009 and our piddly harvest from 2009. We took off a total of 12 ounces last year. We did much better this year!
  
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