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

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.

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

Bees will fly up to 3 miles from the hive so it is difficult to keep them from comming in contact with some pesticides when they are places around cultivated areas. We try to place our hives on farms and Ranches that use older farming and ranching practices as apposed to “modern agriculture”.

Since we are migratory, that is we haul the bees south for the winter, the bees are placed in the southern desert of New Mexico where there is absolutely no agriculture. All of our spring honey and desert (tamarisk), and wildflower honeys are completely pesticide free.

I get a lot of questions about our honey – and most of them require the expertise of our beekeeper, Brent. To help answer all of your questions, we’ve set up a new page, called “Ask the Beekeeper” where you can easily send Brent a direct question.