Beekeeper's Blog — sunnyhoney RSS



Field day on the nooksack

It feels like August was just yesterday, with throngs of tourists packing the main arcade at Pike Place and bees getting ready for a long break in available forage.  And then it was all of a sudden October and I had only done two rounds, maybe three on a few locations, of 2 to 1 thick sugar syrup feed to fatten up food reserves for all our hives.  And now it's mid December, and I've let myself continue to prioritize other tasks, projects, and worries over my baby bees.   I think, though, that I tend to be really hard on myself, always driving to do everything to its fullest and to the far reaches of my best try...and I...

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Bee-pocalypse AKA the farm disaster of the week

What do you get when you mix one totally exhausted and overwhelmed beekeeper/owner operator, a honey house garage door left wide open for 14 hours on a sunny Sunday, and many many neighbors in a small conservative town?  Well, you get the 2014 Everson Beepocalype!   On Labor Day weekend this year, I packed up my truck with two markets worth of tents, tables, honey, and high hopes for a great day, as well as my suitcase to go home to Michigan for a week to attend my cousin Abagail's wedding and relax with family on a red eye flight out of seattle after the long day of driving, managing, and selling.  I got my first indication that I'd messed...

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Winter warmth and timely metaphors

What a couple of gorgeous days we've had up here in soggy 'ol western Washington! The rains let up and we marched ourselves and hundreds of lbs of frame honey out through muddy fields and farm pastures to get our ladies fed!  We hold back tons of honey during extraction to feed back, if needed, to strong springtime clusters.   I'm hesitant to say the word Springtime just yet, as we likely will have a million gallons of steadily-pouring rain yet to deal with, but after the recent cold snaps, I knew whatever bees were still alive would likely need a little treat to boost morale in the hive.  It was also a nice day to cart out any unused equipment that...

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Happy Holidays! Don't BEE scared off by our shipping prices! Web-Only Specials!

Howdy Y'all!  Seems the great big Holiday Season is rapidly approaching, and we all know how intimidating the process of shopping and shipping can be.  Here at Sunny Honey, we use the US postal service, mostly because its an american tradition that we'd like to see maintained.  The shipping costs, however, are hard to calculate and often times this website over-charges customers.  We can easily refund any overcharge and probably have done so with at least 1/4th of all our orders so far.  Remember, everybody loves honey, and so many of our products come in tiny sizes...perfect for stocking stuffers! Today we are cookin' up a fresh batch of Beeswax Lip balms, as well as more worker bee body balm....

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OMG THERE'S SO MUCH HONEY!!!!

Honey has been coming in from all the apiaries, so much so that I haven't been able to spend as much time on the website as I'd like.  Someday soon I'll have really uniform product images and an updated inventory.  But between driving north and south, traffic, markets, extracting, bottling, hand writing labels, and many AWESOME house guests, I just haven't gotten to it! We have extracted and sold most of the early springtime wildflower honey from our Seattle urban hives, and now just in the last two days have extracted 300 more lbs of farm fresh Blueberry blossom honey!  I'm right handed and use that arm for most of the extracting (hand-crank, folks!) and as of today I'm a...

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