This year we’re participating in the Local Food Festival at the Denver Botanic Gardens at Chatfield, co sponsored by the Junior League of Denver.

Come visit our booth!

This video was recently posted on TED and I thought it was great enough to share here. It’s a talk by Dennis vanEngelsdorp, who is the Acting State Apiarist for Pennsylvania’s Department of Agriculture, studying colony collapse disorder — the alarming, worldwide disappearance of worker bees and Western honey bees.

Dennis does a great job conveying his passion for bees and beekeeping.

Today Grampa’s Gourmet Honey was featured on the Edible Front Range Magazine’s blog!

We’ve been covered in the media before, but this is really the first article we’ve seen that truly captures what we are all about!

We had a visitor from the Edible Front Range Magazine Blog!

It was great having Kat Ethington and her husband visit us in Alamosa. We walked her through the end-to-end process of honey making: starting with a exciting visit (people did get stung!) to some of our honey hives where we picked up a few frames of honey. We then went back to the honey house and extracted the honey and sent everyone home with a jar of fresh, raw Colorado Clover honey!

Kat, who is a freelance photographer, also posted even more photos from the trip on her own photoblog.

Here are a couple of them:

Lots of pictures were taken that day...

Brent, explaining how bees cap honey.

You may have noticed that for the last few days we’ve had a new link on our website – to our online store!

You can now order our honey online, by the case. We’re thinking about expanding the store in the future to include single jars to order (as well as comb honey and pollen), but for now we’ve only got the logistics figured out for shipping cases.

And speaking of shipping, the price of every case already includes shipping.

A case has twelve 11.5oz jars of honey in it.

You have a choice of the following honeys

• Clover Honey
• Tamarisk Honey
• Desert Wild Flower Honey
• Chamiso Honey
• White Honey

You can also order a case of Mixed Honey, and we’ll choose a selection of seasonal honeys to allow you to sample them all.

Packing Honey Jars for Shipping

One of my favorite food bloggers Use Real Butter (who is also the official photographer for Grampa’s Gourmet Honeys) recently posted a recipe for a Red Bell Pepper Honey Vinaigrette.  She used our Clover Honey in the recipe, and as always took lots of gorgeous pictures.

I also like the story behind the recipe: she had ordered the dish at a restaurant, asked for the recipe of the vinaigrette and when told that she couldn’t have it, she identified the flavors, jotted them down on her iphone and here’s the result:

Red Bell Pepper Honey Vinaigrette
Use Real Butter – inspired by McGill’s at Crested Butte

1 red bell pepper
1/8 cup red wine vinegar
2 tbsps honey
1/4 tsp oregano
pinch salt
1/4 – 1/2 cup olive oil

Wash, core, and de-seed the pepper. Slice into quarters or eighths and place in a blender with the red wine vinegar, honey, oregano and salt. Purée until smooth. It will look a little frothy. Don’t worry – it settles out. Pour the contents into a bowl and whisk a thin and steady stream of the olive oil into the purée until desired consistency/taste is reached. Tweek the dressing to your liking. Serve on something awesome… like a bed of greens and a few thin slices of blackened grilled flank steak.

Worked bees today and actually remembered the camera. These are some bees on non-gmo Canola in the valley. If they make enough we will have a lot Canola Honey for sale including some comb. Thought the pictures came out pretty good.

Bees working a Canola field in the valley

Bees working a Canola field in the valley

A very unique blog called the My Halal Kitchen recently posted a recipe for Creme Fraiche, Figs & Honey featuring our honey and I thought I’d share.

My Halal Kitchen is blog dedicated to sharing recipes and general information on cooking foods that are halal or permissible by Islam.  It was interesting for me to learn that honey (and bees themselves) are officially considered very important and held in such a high regard by Muslims.

Here’s the recipe:

Serves 2

Ingredients

• 1/2 cup creme fraiche, preferably homemade
• 1 tsp. lemon zest, preferably homemade
• 4 fresh figs
• 1-2 tablespoons honey

Directions

1. Prepare the creme fraiche and citrus peels if making your own.
2. Wash and dry the figs. Cut into quarters.
3. On a plate or platter, dollup the creme fraiche alongside the fig quarters. Drizzle the creme fraiche with honey and citrus peels on top.
4. Serve at room temperature with small forks for dipping.

I thought I’d share some pictures from the farmer’s market:

Our simple honey sign and prices

Grant (that's me!) and Jess with the honey.

You can kind of make out the bee hives in the darkness…

The silhouette on the horizon are the Sangre de Cristo Mountains.

We are happy offer a new honey starting today – Chamiso Honey!

Chamiso aka Rabbit Brush

Chamiso Brush aka Rabbit Brush is an evergreen brush prevalent throughout the South West. The brush is as tough as the landscape that it inhabits. Native Americans often used the flowers of the Chamiso to make tea for curing various illnesses including dizziness, diarrhea and lack of focus.

The healing properties of the Chamiso brush can be felt in its honey. According to legend the nectar (and therefore the honey) from Chamiso is said to help one maintain focus on details while still seeing the larger picture of the project at hand.

This honey will make you stand up and take notice. If you look closely as you pour the honey you will see the striking resemblance in color that the blossom of the plant and the honey share.

This honey was made in the fall of 2009 in Southern Colorado. We have pulled it out of reserve for the first time.

Bee on Chamiso Flowers (pic via Dave Beaudette)