I guess the small motel business is in the same boat. Tonight over a dinner of steak, baked potato, green beans, and a small salad, Mrs. Evans, the owner of the Nueces river motel told me that her and her late husband were only planning on keeping the motel 1 year when they bought it years 40 some years ago. She is as proud as punch that all of the refrigerators are still original. I can say that I certainly would not like to have a child end up in the westing house that I am currently staring at.

The compressor just broke the silence.

The motel is only part of the promise I made made myself to get back to basics. With the beginning of Grampas Gourmet I not only wanted to run bees like gramps but I wanted walk in his footsteps and sleep where he slept. The first job was to find homes for the bees. In Grampa’s day this task was simple as most ranchers back then understood the importance of pollinators and LOVED getting free honey for the use of what amounted to .0001% of their land. Since wealth here seems to be measured in acres this was a no brainer. In fact if you multiply it out and they would be making what today would be $12,000 per acre on the one hundredth of an acre that the bees occupy. Not to mention surplus mesquite beans, parsimons, and other natural feed for live stock.

Today, however, this is not the case. As mentioned in part one, the highest prices for land use goes first to the highest bidder if the family is willing to sell. The ranches are large from 500 to 1/4 million acres. So as you can imagine they aren’t cheap. The only people who can afford to purchase them are multi-millionaires, corporations, and developers. When the developers get them the land is gone. It is broken up into lots and sold to people who build vacation homes. When any of the other two entities get them the are converted to game ranches. The vacationers don’t  have room for bees as they typically fill their 1to5 acres up with stuff to keep them working while they are on vacation, and the hunters on the game ranches just don’t seem to like those pesky bees around while they are sitting in their hunting blinds trying to kill that big buck whitetail deer. Or even worse have a beekeeper drive in to check the bees and scare away the said deer.  (side note: today was the first day of deer season and the reason I have time to write this as I have to wait to move the bees next week when the city deer hunters go home).

Out of all of the ranches in the area that my grandfather kept bees I would say that 80% have either changed hands or have gone strictly to hunting leases to pay the bills.

As I started to look for bee locations I contacted the children and grandchildren of the previous owners whom my grandfather knew. They helped the best they could and I found 2 that still had their ranches and were ranching. They agreed to let me put the bees out and were ecstatic to get honey. My other locations came by way chance and begging

I believe that the hunting ranches still have promise for the bees. Bees pollenate many of the brush species of plants that deer and other game species feed on.  This obviously helpseoduce fruit and seeds and helps the plants reproduce and thrive, hence larger healthier deer ect. If I can educate the managers of these ranches about this perhaps they will be more agreeable. Time will tell. As for now this country needs rain more than anything.

Here I sit alone, in a small old motel room in Barksdale Texas, Saturday night. Three doors away from room #6, (I am in #3, there are only 6 rooms) the room that the beekeepers would gather in. They would drink whiskey while they talked bees and told stories of the ranchers they had seen while doing work in the outlying beeyards and the gossip or rather the news of the country. Mostly the news was of who had died, been hurt or who was in trouble. It was the way news was spread then and believe it or not, down here it still is.

It is dead quite except for the occasional truck rolling by.

Back then there were at least 5 different beekeeping operators that migrated from Colorado to Texas. All of them were based in Colorado but met up here twice a year. Once in the fall when old man winter started nipping and the bees stopped flying in the San Luis valley (elevation 7400) when every one would gather their bees and truck them 850 miles south to the hill country of Texas. Effectively giving the bees an extended fall, and much milder winter as well as an earlier spring. Why here? Well it was the best place, the farthest south that one could drive without stopping (more or less) in one VERY FULL day. The beekeepers and their hired hands would eventually meet up in town and pick a night hang out, usually on a Saturday such as this.

Another truck just rolled by.

Today there are just two of us Bill Rickey and me. Bill is 60 and a son of one of the original 5. He has ecked out a meager living for the past 30 some years and managed to survive while everyone else is gone. It’s not surprising that our “industry” is all but gone. The Texas hill country was the start and heart of Texas ranching and it is all but gone as well. Here the rule seems to be that land has to pay the bills. Whether its live stock, farming, hunting, or selling. It is clear that the latter two have proven the most lucrative.

A dog just barked.

Out of the depression America was a producing nation and as such commodities were king. The hill country supplied the wool from both sheep and goats that keep our soldiers warm in World War II and my grandfather produced the bees wax that kept the wool and the artillery dry. Today there are synthetics instead of wool and there are petroleum based waxes.

I grew up in the bees, my grandfather passed when I was young, I learned from my uncle who, when he took over the family business quit coming to this part of Texas to winter. I grew up on stories about Barksdale, Camp Wood, and La Pryor Texas. The stories stuck with me and I lavished them. Many of the stories are based around local characters who are ranchers or vise versa.

When I finally went out on my own I was more concentrated on the bees and my own ego. I thought I knew how to improve on my own family tradition. So I put my memories away and opted to winter my bees closer in southern New Mexico. The first few years I was lucky to have favorable weather and healthy bees. But in 2006 I lost half of my 600 colonies during the winter. I didn’t know what had happened but I found out later that it wasn’t just me. It was nation wide. Since that year beekeepers around the country having been having severe ongoing issues. In 2009, after 3 years of trying everything I knew to keep the bees healthy it occured to me that perhaps we as bee keepers have simply forgot the basics, just as most Americans have forgot about wool and beeswax, and have been slowly changing our ways to the point that the bees are out of sync.

As a result of this epiphany I developed a new-old way of beekeeping and in the process started a new company with new-old goals and very old ideas.

Part two. In Grampas footsteps…

Taken over the 4th of July Weekend 2011 in the beautiful San Luis Valley, Colorado.

Beekeepers today are faced with an overwhelming number of challenges. Between pests, disease, and environmental factors it gets harder every year to keep a colony of bees alive and healthy. Most of the commercial beekeepers today are in an “all-in” game and feel that they cannot risk losing their bees by not treating them with chemicals for various pests.

In contrast, I have come to the conclusion that getting back to the simple and basic way that my grandfather and great grandfather maintained bees is the best long term solution.

Beekeeping in Chama, New Mexico

The first thing I noticed as a kid was the fact that in larger commercial beekeeping operation it is all about the amount of honey you can produce. I worked in the extracting room (where the honey is removed from the comb) as a child and fondly remember seeing many different colors of honey on various frames. I would always taste them before loading them into the extractor and try and guess the floral source from which they came. Later, after work, I would describe the color and taste to my uncle, and tell him what I thought it was, eager for his confirmation. It was then that I had the idea of keeping all of the honeys separate, which we painstakingly do today.

Our varietal honeys are born out of timing and careful placement of hives. While we obviously can’t control where the bees forage, we can put them within close proximity of certain blooming plants. In addition we produce several different honeys within a particular area as well. Since not all plants bloom at the same time we can remove honey from the hives prior to a second or third bloom of a different plant.

Every year’s crop is different. Different annual climates will make different plants bloom. We produce our light clover honey in abundance, but all of our other honeys change every year. We take the time (unlike most beekeepers) to keep the floral sources separate. So while we may only have 4,000 units of one kind of honey, we have multiple different varieties of honey and something new is always around the corner with the coming season.

We consider ourselves to be migratory beekeepers. We move the bees at different times of the year to keep them in areas with good forage. There have been some critics recently who claim that moving the bees is stressful to them and a cause of recent die offs. However, in 20 plus years of working the bees, I have never seen ill effects from moving bees unless done improperly.

Below are some pictures from two weeks ago in the mountain valley of Chama, New Mexico. Just across the Colorado border. We were supering the bees with more boxes because they had made so much honey.  The plant in the foreground is called Vetch or Loco Weed.  It is a good plant for bees in the spring. It was just finishing blooming. We use to make surplus honey from the Vetch but the dry condition have made the plant more rare and now the bees keep that first honey they make.

There is an old steam train that goes from Antonito, Colorado to Chama. It’s called the Cumbres Toltec Railroad. It goes over Cumbres/La Manga Pass one of the most beautiful passes in Colorado. I really enjoy the trip to Chama to work bees. We always see tons of wildlife and seeing the picturesque train chuggin up the pass is almost surreal.

I know this movie is made by Nokia as some kind of an ad, but it’s a beautiful movie about urban beekeeping and staying connected to nature and the food we eat. So I thought I’d share.

Nokia – HK Honey from The Silentlights on Vimeo.

Hong Kong is home to more than 7 million people. Amongst the high rise apartments, product designer Michael Leung founder of HK Honey, has created his own space bringing nature back into the metropolis one box at a time.

HK Honey is an organisation of Hong Kong beekeepers, artists & designers who aim to communicate the value of bees to the human food chain & the benefits of locally produced honey. With a network of bee farms and a design studio, Michael and HK Honey harvest local honey & design products and services relating to urban beekeeping.

Directed by Kiku Ohe. (www.thesilentlights.com)

Produced by Exit Films as part of Nokia’s E7 Success Redefined campaign. (youtube.com/nokia)

In the fall, as the weather gets cold in Northern New Mexico and Southern Colorado we take the bees to Rodeo, New Mexico.

The Terroir: Rodeo, New Mexico

Rodeo is located in the San Simon Valley, at the base of the Chiricahua Mountains, on the border of New Mexico and Arizona about 30miles South of I-10. We came here as a result of fortuitous events. In the 1970’s a man by the name of Dan Shultz moved to Rodeo and started keeping bees. He liked the desert and especially liked that the desert provided an abundance of organic forage for the bees. Over 20 years he ran Rodeo Honey Company, supplying towns in the area with quality local honey. Dan passed away in 2007 at the same time we were looking for new place to winter the bees. We subsequently bought the remaining bees and locations.

The bees, after a hard summers work “vacation” in the warm desert where their chances of survival through winter is substantially increased. This move extends the fall forage late in to early November and by late November the bees are begin to wind down and go dormant for winter.

There are two scenarios that typically happen in the Chiricahua desert in the spring. The first scenario is that the desert receives good winter and spring rain and as a result it comes alive with flora and flowers. When this happens the bees collect hundreds of different nectars at the same time and make what we call “Desert Wild Flower”. Among the plants are: ocotillo, cactus, broom weed, burro weed, desert buckwheat, desert bird or paradise, mimosa , and common mesquite.

The second scenario is that there are virtually no winter or spring rains but the previous summer rains were good. In which case the wild flowers do not bloom but the common mesquite, the most hardy of almost any desert plant, will bloom. The deep roots of the mesquite can tap the ground moisture from the previous summer. When this happens the bees make pure mesquite honey. Pure mesquite is water white and a taste that so unique it is indescribable. It granulates with a natural creaminess. We sell very little of this honey opting instead to use it as a catalyst for cream honey.

This year the first scenario played out. The honey was a true wildflower but you will notice that it granulates fast and smooth and has an incredible finish. This is due to the large amount of mesquite that the bees collected along with the other nectar.

Grampa's Desert Wildflower Honey

Just got back from moving the bee down south to Rodeo, New Mexico. Bees traveled well and at their desert home for the winter. Time for some rest. see photos:

Our Hives in Rodeo, NM

Our Hives in Rodeo, NM

Our Hives in Rodeo, NM

Our Hives in Rodeo, NM

Our Hives in Rodeo, NM

She’s doing some amazing work.

Some pictures of this year’s honey harvest in the San Luis Valley.

Brent Edelen harvesting Honey, San Luis Valley, CO, 2010

Harvesting Honey, San Luis Valley, CO, September 2010

Harvesting Honey, San Luis Valley, CO, September 2010

Brent Edelen harvesting honey, San Luis Valley, CO, September 2010