Highlands Honey
Phil Laflamme
Anglican Church Rd.
(613) 267–4614
<highlandshoney@storm.ca>
What he offers: honey, comb honey, starter bee hives (nucs), queen bees
Where he sells: Perth Farmers Market (Saturday mornings), Foodsmiths, Balderson Cheese, Balderson Fine Foods, Pretty Goods, Clydesville General Store, and other locations in the area, Ottawa, and Toronto.
Highlands Honey
As I write this month’s farmer profile I am seated at my desk in my studio looking out over a small wild field. Out of the corner of my eye I can see a lot of dark specks to-ing and fro-ing — some shooting off into the blue sky and others zipping back making a “beeline” for the hives which are standing just out of sight next to the barn. The window is open and the studio is filled with the very specific scent of goldenrod nectar being dehydrated by the movement of thousands of vibrating wings — a scent that has been described as “a combination of bread baking on the hearth and fermenting cheese” (Charles Sauriol, A Beeman’s Journey). I am guessing that this is what the constant hummbuzzing is all about these days as the fields and ditches yellow-up with late summer blooms and the bees finally have some great foraging weather. It is a “hive of activity” out there and the bees are busy stockpiling their honey and pollen stores in preparation for the coming winter.
Bees are fascinating creatures and human interaction with them dates back to before 7000 B.C. when gatherers climbed into trees and caves, and up cliffs, to harvest honey from wild bee colonies. Today, there are thousands of beekeepers around the world who manage colonies of bees for honey production, crop pollination, beeswax production, breeding purposes and the sale of bees. In Lanark County alone, there are approximately 100 beekeepers, the majority of whom are hobbyists who keep a few hives. A few years ago, I bought some used bee equipment and was directed to Phil Laflamme who, besides supplying our area with honey, also raises and sells bees. Phil is one of our few full-time apiarists and the owner of Highlands Honey. He brings to Lanark County 30+ years of apiculture experience from a myriad of locations across Canada and the U.S. As a kid Phil loved the outdoors and raised insects to feed his reptile pets. In his 20’s he worked on an organic farm in New Brunswick that had some bee hives. A few years later, he says, while living in Calgary and “doing some soul-searching about his future”, he decided to take a beekeeping course at night-school. Since then, his journeys in the beekeeping world have found him working with a large honey operation in Saskatchewan, with a beekeeping cooperative in B.C, travelling through Central America where he met with beekeepers, working with Agriculture Canada apiculture research programs in Alberta, and Guelph (where he learned about bee breeding), and working in Florida in a bee genetics operation where he was part of an artificial insemination team. Phil knows a lot about these creatures and it is always facinating to visit one of his bee yards to have an up close look at what he does. We are lucky to have such a resource in our own backyard!
Though bees need a lot of space to go about their foraging (they roam up to a few kilometres), owning a lot of land is not necessary to become a beekeeper as people are often happy to host bee yards on otherwise unused old fields. Lanark County has a lot of this kind of land, which is ideal for bees in many ways: the fields aren’t sprayed with chemicals, there is a diversity of wild plants, and there is often a mix of forest and field. Vegetable gardens too benefit from bee activity through pollination. Phil has four bee yards around Lanark Highlands. Altogether in those yards, he manages 130 regular hives, and 300 mating nucs. From his hives he extracts between 12,000 and 18,000 pounds of honey annually. I visited one of the yards where he raises queens and nucs. It is in a corner of an old field — open but not used for cultivation or grazing anymore — now full of wildflowers, grasses, “weeds” and wild marjoram. It is surrounded by an electric fence (to keep out bears). Pulling a frame of bees from a hive, he explained some of the ins and outs of raising queen cells to me, while spotting and picking up a recently hatched queen with his fingers (from amidst hundreds of bees) and marking her with a bright dot on the back. This mark makes the queen easier to spot, and helps the beekeeper keep track of her age (different colour each year). Soon she will be caged and sold to a beekeeper in need of a new queen.
Most people, I would imagine, think that beekeepers keep bees for the purpose of selling honey. While this is often the case, beekeeping over the years has shifted significantly. Where apiarists could earn a living producing and selling honey twenty years ago, today making a living with bees requires much ingenuity, economies of scale, and often diversity in practice. Bulk honey prices in Canada have dropped enormously to compete with honey imports from around the world — notably Argentina, Australia and Asia — and now barely cover the cost of production. As other food producers in the west have experienced, it is almost impossible to compete with cheap imports, and many commercial beekeepers have either gone bust or have moved into other areas like pollination services. With the rise of industrial agriculture — which has done its part to eradicate many native pollinators — many bee operations now find it more lucrative to ship thousands of hives back and forth across the continent on transport trucks from early spring to late fall, for the sole purpose of pollinating giant acreages of food crops like almonds, apples, oranges, blueberries, cherries, strawberries and cucumbers.
Additional challenges to beekeeping have come in the form of very damaging diseases and infestations, notably tracheal and varroa mites, and American Foulbrood. The only positive side to these problems has been that cross-border bee importation has been seriously restricted (most diseases have come up from the US), so regional bee breeders like Phil have a chance to make some money selling bee stock (queens and nucs) to beekeepers locally and across the country. While I visited the bee yard, Phil told me about a recent sale he made of hundreds of queen cells (unhatched queens) to a beekeeper in PEI who is trying to introduce mite-resistant genetics into his colonies.
But back to the sweet stuff — honey. Consider these facts: it takes about 20,000 bees to bring in a pound of nectar which will reduce down to ¼ lb of honey. If each bee were to gather enough nectar to make a single pound of honey, it would have to fly a distance more than three times around the world! These little critters work hard for their survival and our pleasure. If you taste local honeys, you will notice that they can differ significantly depending on the beekeeper’s location. This is because honey flavours are determined by the type of nectar collected. Honey from the wilder parts of Lanark (old fields, forests, swamps), Highlands Honey included, is characterized by a very special basswood overtone. If this sounds like wine tasting, there are definitely similarities. Each location and each year can be quite distinct depending on what blooms well that year and what might have been planted in nearby fields. What may look to some like an abandoned, weedy field, would look pretty good to a bee, and produce some of the finest tasting honey! A great place to sample different local honey and see how honey is extracted is at the Lanark County Beekeepers Association’s (LCBA) booth at the Perth Fair (Labour Day Weekend). You might run into Phil there but if not, be sure to stop at his stall on Saturday mornings at the Perth Farmers Market where he sells his honey.
Finally, if you are interested in keeping bees, be sure to come out to the LCBA’s very informative meetings (four per year) at McMartin House in Perth. The next one is in November and you can contact Phil for more information.
HH Coffee Lemonade (hot or cold)
1 tsp honey lemon juice, water and honey to taste
1 c. coffee try additions of mint, ginger, soda water, raspberry juice….
Simple yes! But if everyone sweetened their coffee, tea and lemonade with honey instead of sugar, it would keep local beekeepers in business, cut down energy consumption related to processing and transporting refined sugar, and augment the numbers of pollinators in the area!!
And a note on nutrition…
“Honey that has not been heated over 117 degrees is loaded with amylases, enzymes that digest carbohydrates, as well as all the nutrients found in plant pollens. This makes it an ideal sweetener for porridge and toast, as the amylases in raw honey help digest grains. Glucose tolerance tests indicate that, for most people, honey does not upset blood sugar levels as severely as does refined sugar.” — Sally Fallon, Nourishing Traditions