Prairie Field Honey

Celebrating World Bee Day today! These bees are looking fabulous. I’d say the bees in southwest Saskatchewan are thriving.

Thank you for following our beekeeping journey over the years. We are making some changes to our social media platforms heading forward. Instagram will be the ONLY place where we post about Prairie Field Honey. You are welcome to follow along over there, head to our website (www.prairiefieldhoney.com), or sign up for our newsletter at the website.

Tuesday, January 16th, this page, as well as my personal page, will be deleted. I am longing to connect in more face-to-face ways with the people I love and allow for more creative space in my life.

Thank you for your kind understanding and thank you, again, for following a long!!

Books make me happy!

During 2024 I want to continue building my repertoire of good beekeeping stories. The Honey Bus by Meredith May is a beautifully written memoir of a young girl growing up alongside her beekeeping grandfather. I loved this book!

This is a perfect read for a cold winter’s evening with a cup of tea and honey, of course.

How do we possibly find the words to express our deep gratitude for your support of Prairie Field Honey this past year?

So we simply offer the two most profound words we know… THANK YOU!

Thank you for coming to the farmers market every Saturday morning during the summer months.

Thank you for putting a jar of honey in your shopping cart while at the grocery store.

Thank you for purchasing candles and beeswax food wraps at our front door.

Thank you placing orders on our online shop.

Thank you for your words of encouragement and for cheering us on during this challenging year.

We would not have survived 2023 without the large outpouring of support from our local community. We are profoundly grateful!

Happy New Year from the beekeepers at Prairie Field Honey.

photo credit from the beautifully talented .langridge

The bees are officially ready for winter! They have been fed and watered, medicated, wrapped, and prayed over. That’s all we can do. The rest is out of our control.

We’ve had an unbelievably long and warm fall. The cold winter temperatures have not yet arrived. It will be interesting to see how the bees handle this change in weather conditions. Now, for sure, cold weather will come, but we’ve had many beautiful days in November where the bees have been flying around.

Every year is different, and every winter season brings its own challenges. We are hoping with great expectation that the bees will thrive during the next four months! We will keep you posted.

This blue and white striped tent means a lot to us. Every Saturday from the middle of June until the end of September, we set up our Prairie Field Honey table and welcome customers to our local farmers market.

We’ve shown up at the corner of Central Avenue and Chaplin Street for 13 years (the first year there was no tent!).

We are PROFOUNDLY grateful for the support we’ve received from our local community. The farmers market would not exist unless people continued to show up here every Saturday!

And I love connecting personally with our customers. I love hearing how the grandkids are, and where people have vacationed, and what grade they’re going into next. I love the conversations and laughter!!

So thank you, again, Swift Current for making the 2023 farmers market season such an incredibly enjoyable one!

Oh, the queen bee! She really is lovely isn’t she. Of the 50 queens we received in spring, 48 are thriving.

She spends the summer laying eggs, one every 20 seconds or so with a few breaks in between. She has a very devoted group of worker bees who ensure her ever need is met.

The queen has 3-4 good years of egg laying before she enters the geriatric stage and retires.

Yay for the queen!!

Looking for the queen! We made 50 nuc boxes last week, and in order for these new hives to be successful, we need to ensure that the queen stays in the hives from which we harvested the brood.

This is a slow but very important job. Kevin is the right man for this job…

Kevin and I have been busy making nuc boxes. After gathering brood and worker bees from strong hives, we introduce the queen. These photos are a depiction of how quickly the workers can identify the queen by her pheromones and surround the cage waiting for her to be released. This took all of 12 seconds!

Happy Father’s Day to this beekeeper! We love you.

Oh, the dandelion! We have learned to love this flower. It signals the start of spring and kickstarts early activity in the beehives.

A close second to the dandelion flowers are the caragana bushes. It’s a mystery why the bees love all these early yellow spring flowers. Scientifically, they have lots of nectar in them, but yellow is certainly a thing with the bees in southwest Saskatchewan.

We think their choice of flowers is admirable.

Celebrating World Bee Day today!

photo credit: .langridge

This young man earned his beekeeping wings 13 years ago at the tender age of 8. His family gently (and sometimes firmly) urged him to keep going: this would get easier and he might even enjoy it down the road.

Yesterday received his aviation wings! This accomplishment was harder than the first but far more rewarding. His family cheered wildly and didn’t care who heard.

We had the most wonderful weekend celebrating Matthew!!

From beekeeper to pilot.

The snow is disappearing and the hives are finally accessible. Feeder pails have been placed, treatment for American Foulbrood has commenced, and the numbers have been tallied.

We’ve sustained a 16% winter mortality loss. This is higher than we’d hoped but much lower than we’d anticipated. We are hearing reports from fellow beekeepers in the northern part of our province suffering 50-75% losses. These numbers are catastrophic!

Canadian winters are hard on bees and some winters worse than others. 2022-23 has been brutal.

We celebrate our birthdays 10 days apart, and today is his! Happy birthday to the best beekeeper I know.
photo credit: .langridge

Soon, little friends, you’ll be able to leave the hive and smell spring in the air. Although we have entered March, and there’s still snow on the ground, and temperatures are bitterly cold, I promise that warm weather is coming. We can’t wait to see how you weathered the winter. Hang in there just a little bit longer…

Kevin and I never intended the hives we bought 13 years ago to become an actual business. They were intended to provide our, then young sons, with something to do during the summer. They were meant as a little side hustle in conjunction with our “real” jobs.

So here we find ourselves with an actual business, having both quit our day jobs several years ago, and trying to figure out how this should work. We didn’t begin with a business plan, or a hope to have followers on social media, or maintain a website, or pursue certification with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (I couldn’t have even told you what that was!). Having fresh honey to eat and knowing where it came from, and perhaps sharing a few jars with our family and friends was the small goal we had at the beginning.

During the past 4-5 years, I have attended and signed up for a number of seminars and resources that have taught me about starting a small business and doing everything that comes along with that. I have gleaned valuable insights from all these directions, however, the ex*****on of a lot of these ideas and plans have been paralyzing for me.

This January I took matters into my own hands and looked for someone who could walk beside me and actually help me accomplish some of the things I’ve wanted to tackle for years.
langridge has been a godsend! Every Wednesday afternoon, we gather for a couple of hours in front of my computer and we work through the list: Instagram tutorials, creating things in Canva, developing a plan for social media, getting a work email separate from our personal email, creating a mood board, designing and executing a biweekly email newsletter, and so much more.

This has absolutely been a game changer for me, and I could not be more grateful to Delina for her help and inspiration. I now have a plan and a few shaky skills/abilities to make things happen.

“What do beekeepers do in winter?” This may be our most frequently asked question. The list of what we do during the winter months is long, but making beeswax candles is at the top of the list.

These candles are handmade in small batches. Kevin has been working hard and thousands of candles have been wrapped and stored away. He’s on a roll…

This semi, full of honey barrels, left the shop in the wee hours of the morning. We are profoundly grateful to have secured a honey contract and see the culmination of our hard work this past summer.

Kevin and I loaded the barrels yesterday in the cold winter wind but we’re tough prairie folks and we did it!

Now the planning begins for this coming year…

Happy New Year from Prairie Field Honey!

Kevin and I want to say thank you. Thank you for supporting this small family run beekeeping company. Thank you to our local community for continuing to buy honey. Thank you to our larger community who buys honey from our online shop. Thank you to those who have left encouraging messages and filled our inbox with positive life-giving words.

We are profoundly grateful for your ongoing support. We will confidently walk into 2023 because of you.

THANK YOU!!

photo credit .langridge

Back in September we had the loveliest group of Girl Guides visit the extraction shop for a tour. Grade 7/8 girls are the best—they were curious and engaging, they asked great questions and had just a hint of sass that made them absolutely delightful! We thoroughly enjoyed our evening with this group of (almost) young ladies.

Shortly after, they asked if we would partner with them for a fundraiser. This entire group of Girl Guides is planning on attending summer camp in British Columbia next summer.

Absolutely and 100% YES!!

These girls absolutely knocked it out of the ballpark. They sold a boatload of honey, and were incredibly enthusiastic about their fundraising goals.

We’d love to see these young ladies at the shop again, perhaps, for another tour, or even as an employee or two…

We wish you all the best at summer camp.

Let the candle making begin…

Can we please just stop right now and have a cup of tea? And let’s add a spoonful of honey!

That’s all for today…

Weather report: -14°C (7°F) which feels like -21°C (-6°F) with the wind. The sun is shining.

Madame winter has arrived and the ground is covered in a layer of beautiful white snow. It’s the perfect evening to light some candles, to breathe deeply and allow the quietness to settle in my soul.

…and we’re done!! The bees are looking strong and healthy and are 100% ready for winter. We’ve done everything possible to ensure their survival through the upcoming winter season and Kevin and I are now going to sleep for the month of November and then we’ll be good.

Our 2022 honey season has been completed! These honey supers will be put into storage until next summer.

Ideally, we had hoped to use all these supers out in the apiary this summer but that did not happen. It was our smallest harvest in 12 years.

We needed more moisture! We experienced more drought like conditions with excessive heat which means there were fewer flowers. Flowers are what the bees need to make honey.

Fortunately, our bees are heading into winter looking exceptionally strong. For this we are grateful and we continue to have hope for a good honey season next summer.

“ What day is it?” asked Pooh. “It’s today,” squeaked Piglet.
“My favourite day,” said Pooh.

Happy Canadian Thanksgiving to our friends and family!

Photo credit: .langridge

There are few things we enjoy more than having young students visit the extraction shop! Thank you, Mrs. Hanel, for bringing your class for a tour. Perhaps there is a budding beekeeper in the lot…

All the honey supers are off the field—every last one of them!

While there remains a boatload of fall work to be completed, it feels fantastic to have all the honey in the shop. Now we can breathe a little easier and begin dreaming about next year… Isn’t that what farmers/beekeepers always do?

What exactly does it mean when we say, “The bees are robbing.”

As the hot long days of summer gradually turn into the cooler shorter days of fall, the flowers begin to dry up and die. When this happens the nectar also disappears which is what the bees collect and turn into honey during the summer months.

The bees have been storing their honey in the hive for consumption during the winter months but we have now taken all that honey off the hive and there are no flowers left and no nectar available to be collected. The bees become frantic to protect and maintain their winter food supply.

As we take the last of the honey off the hives the bees are unwilling to leave the loaded honey frames alone. They come after them with all their might and this is called robbing!

During the summer months, when there are still plenty of flowers and nectar left in the field, the bees are not bothered at all when we take honey off their hives. They know there is plenty more where that came from.

Because of this “robbing” issue it becomes much more challenging during the final honey pull. There are many more bee stings and much more time is taken to remove the bees from the honey supers before transporting them to the shop.