Thornhill Farm

The bees have overwintered well and are starting to fly on warm days.

We have spent much of the winter making Apitherapy honey elderberry extract and Honey house propolis salve.

As I was walking away from a gathering recently, and someone asked me about the bees.

Wherever I go in northern Vermont, there is awareness and interest in honey bees. People are conscious of the bees and want to know how they are wintering, how the crop is going, or how they are surviving the attack of the parasitic mites.

As I started talking about the bees and how we are now combining honey with elderberry, a group of elder ladies gathered around around and started telling stories about what their parents did with elderberry when they were children. Jam was made, to be used through the winter when someone had a cold or flu, pie and wine were part of the yearly rhythm of the farm kitchen. The ladies were excited to remember a fruit that was important to the family in their youth and that they have not seen much of since then. The elderberry has skipped a generation.

Days after making elderberry, I am still find purple splotches on my clothing. It is a very tenacious berry. At the Vermont Food Venture Center in Fairfax, where we make the elderberry extract,we learned that elderberry is the only food product that stains the white coats we wear there that will not come clean in the wash. This reminded me of propolis that lingers in our bee suits after many washings.

It is now five months since these elderberries were harvested and 12 years since Lewis Hill told me about the elderberries and and encouraged me to get involved with them. The journey has been a long one I reflected on all of this last week at the end of one of Tim and my 11 hour days in the Venture Center making elderberry extract. Purple jars with different formulations were scattered all over the room and we were closing in on the fine tuning for the formula. We were on the edge of finding a way to keep our bees’ Apitherapy raw honey from crystallizing and the elderberry from jellying up in the bottle and still keep the honey totally raw. Samples were delivered by messenger (me) up to a $7,000 computer analyzing each test batch as we tweaked the recipe.

“Tim, we have made elderberry-honey extract !” I proclaimed, feeling almost drunk in the spirit as I realized how we were at the conclusion of many years of work.

“We are not making elderberry, “ he wisely responded, “we are delivering elderberry.”

Thank you for your support of our bees and their work.

The elderberry has long been used for healing in Native America and in the Vermont farm kitchen. Traditionally used for colds and the flu, it is rich in Vitamin C. Elderberry has been known to build up the immunity system and to fight some viruses that chemical medicines do not work on. At the honey house we mix organic elderberry with Apitherapy raw honey, propolis, and organic Echinacea. Propolis is a natural antibiotic gathered by the bees from the buds of poplar and pine trees.

Your food shall be your medicine and your medicine shall be your food. Hipprocrates (460 – 377 B.C.)

A Spotty Summer
This summer has given new meaning to the descriptive term “spotty”, used in beekeeping to describe the widely diverse yields of honey that may be found from yard to yard in some seasons.

A few weeks ago, we went to one yard to take honey off for the third time this season. Over half of the colonies yielded 200 or more pounds, most of which had come in during the previous 14 days. Some of these are colonies that had already had 200 pounds taken off in June and July, which meant that they have now made 400 pounds, with the goldenrod and aster honey still to be gathered.

I had never seen anything like this before. The power in nature is humbling, and I will always be in awe of what this yard made in 1998.

At the other end of the scale, there are yards nearby with colonies that have not made any honey this year, this is the ” spotty” nature of the season. Where the bees did make honey, it came late and with the volume of a tidal wave. It is often hard to tell why there are differences in yards and with seasons. Ten basswood trees that are maturing near a bee yard could make a difference. Also, in some years their blossoms may be knocked off by a rain storm. A 60 acre field of alfalfa cut earlier one year because of good drying conditions may change a crop. In areas where dairy farming is fading, goldenrod fields are part of the succession of plants. We do know that it was cool and wet for much of the early season. So much of these things remains a mystery, but we are always grateful for the honey that the bees do make.

We appreciate your interest and support of our bees and their work.

As beekeepers, we work through a rhythm of yearly cycles. These include helping the bees build up for and then gather a crop for around six months of the year, harvesting this crop (with hope that there is one, it doesn’t always happen), packaging the crop, and working on marketing the honey and building equipment while the bees are dormant and resting up for the next season.

While this yearly cycle is constant, what is different each season and also on a day-to-day basis, are the constant changes of the flowers, amount of rainfall and snow, temperature in the location where the bees are (and on the other side of the world, which affect us), and also cultural changes of each location, such as alfalfa and clovers being cut earlier than 30 years ago in order to provide more protein for dairy cows, construction and development building in areas for flowers for the bees once grew, and farms becoming abandoned, which may allow for wildflowers such as berry bushes, goldenrod and asters to grow more profusely. 1997 will be remembered as an unusual year where patterns in nature were different, often unexplainable, which I think of as mysteries of the land.

• Because of a cool Spring, most of the colonies only had one day or so of flight to work on the dandelions in May. The bees traditionally get dandelion nectar and pollen for several weeks, and this enables them to build up for the main crops of the summer and fall. With only one day on the dandelions and a three+ week delay in other nectar and pollen, the bees were noticeably weaker most of the summer and many colonies had starved by June.

• This was a season where the bees made less honey from the ” major honey plants” (alfalfa, clovers, goldenrod) and a greater percentage from the ” minor” plants that provided nectar such as milkweed, chicory, purple loosestrife, sumac, thistle, leafy spurge, and aster. An early frost killed much of the goldenrod in September and later the warmest October in memory enabled the bees to work the aster plants for weeks on end and make honey.

• Several bee yards made zero honey up to early September and then made an 80 lb. per colony average during two weeks in mid-September. I saw this as a miracle it was very humbling to feel the power of nature.

These monumental forces that change the nature of each week for the honey bees are impressive and command a great deal of respect. We are not able to predict the changes that we face each season. While this is unusual for a business in America in the 1990’s, these changes have always been a constant for beekeeping. We have faith that over the years, the bees will make crops of honey.