What an amazing couple of weeks we’ve enjoyed. We’ve handspun more honey, hosted another beekeeping course, collected and filtered our beeswax in the solar cooker and blended our raw honey and beeswax into a natural range of non-toxic lip balms…and then we sold them at farmers’ markets to a great response as people enjoyed the natural flavour and texture of a non-synthetic lip balm. Yay!
Our first farmers market was such a proud moment knowing all the work that had gone into caring for the bees, the manual labour of the honey spinning, the careful melting of the beeswax, the hand grating of the wax so we could melt it at a lower temperature to retain its best properties, the sourcing and adding of the organic oils and essential oils…and the blending in of our beautiful raw honey. Sure, we didn’t make a lot of money, but there’s an unquantifiable pleasure when you witness someone enjoying the fruits of your labour.
In addition to milking goats, making soaps, vegetable gardning and farm work, we’ve been working on the business so thanks again to Robin our Canadian WWOOFER who helped us do the graphic design for our new logo. A while ago we decided to rename our farm and farmstay from “Country Roads” which was the previous owner’s name for the acreage to….drumroll…”Honeycomb Valley”. We just think the new name really suits what we’re trying to do, plus, we love our honeycomb, and the view from the bee hives down across our valley is just so beautiful. We hope when people enjoy our goats milk soap, our balms and other products, that the name Honeycomb Valley will end up standing for natural, hand made, and well cared for and loved animals, land and people.
For those of you who can’t make it to the farmers markets at Gloucester and Nabiac, we’re also developing a new website for Honeycomb Valley so we can sell our products online. From honey & goatsmilk soap, through to a special moisturising balm we’re calling “Honey Liquid Gold” that we blended for our daughter’s eczema (using our February honey harvest which according to Rod the Beeman (aka mentor of the universe) was “Jelly Bush”…or for us regular folk…from the flowers of the tree leptospermum scoparium (the Australian equivalent of the healing Manuka Honey).
So…beekeeping. It’s intensely satisfying. Not just knowing how important bees are to our food supply thanks to their pollination efforts, but also to know that if you plant flowers and plants for them, if you help keep their pest enemies down with natural methods, they’ll reward you over and over with the most delicious honey and useful wax. I am nervous about the threat of varroa mite to Australia, but we’ll have to deal with that when it comes.
At the Pacific Palms market on the weekend, I met three people who all said that beekeeping was on their list of things to do before they die. If you’re even the slightest bit interested in bees…or just after a good read, can I recommend two books: The Honey Spinners (non-fiction) and The Secret Life of Bees. We also have a beekeeping course you can do here on the farm and at a commercial apiary, as well as an introduction to beekeeping DVD that’s worth a look. If you’re looking for a new hobby, beekeeping might just be the most satisfying pastime you ever take up!
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