05/27/2026
Thank you to everyone who has been waiting patiently for our spring honey harvest, we are officially back in stock! You know us as the Lazy Acres Apiary from the From Scratch Co-Op selling our Bees Know Best Honey.
This year, we decided to focus on what makes our apiary special and that's our Natural Beekeeping Strategy. We've dropped the name Lazy Acres and are now the Bees Know Best Apiary.
Our name means we practice keeping in the most natural, organic way we can by supporting the bees natural instincts, and you can taste the difference in our raw honey.
So this post is going to be a little long, but anyone who comes to our table at the farmer's market knows that bees are our thing, and we love to talk about them.
Here's how Natural Beekeeping produces the best honey:
First: No sugar supplemental feeding for the bees. Sugar has one compound, a simple carbohydrate. It's the apian equivalent of feeding a child exclusively corn syrup.
Our bees forage up to 5 miles from the hive for pollen and nectar from flowering plants and trees. Foraged pollen and nectar contains 250+ different compounds including amino acids, minerals, b-complex vitamins, vitamin C, vitamin E, trace alkaloids, and many more beneficial elements.
The flavor of the best honey comes from these nutrients, from the flowers and trees the bees pollinated. That's why it tastes the best.
Second: We don't chemically treat our bees against mites or other pests. Chemically treating hives for mites weakens the bees and creates chemical-resistant mites. We deploy other strategies against varroa mites, more on this later.
What does this mean for your honey? No intentional chemical residue anywhere inside our hives, the honeycomb, or the honey.
Third: (THIS IS REALLY COOL) We don't artificially propagate our bees, we let the hives split naturally when they decide it's time to swarm. A lot of commercial beekeepers split their hives to prevent swarming. We don't do that.
For those of you who don't know, swarming is a 2 part, very important, HUGE aspect of developing strong honeybee genetics because it's a way of reproducing.
Part 1 is this is part of our strategy to defeat Varroa mites. Most people are aware that there's an epidemic of varroa mites amongst bee colonies. They are the biggest internal threat to honeybee hives. They lay their eggs inside of honeybee brood (baby eggs).
The queen is the only bee in the whole hive that lays eggs. When a colony swarms, no eggs are laid for a period of time because the old queen took off with the swarm. The hive usually doesn't have a new Queen on standby ready to lay eggs immediately either. They have a few queens almost ready to "emerge" from the honeycomb, but none ready to lay. This time break interrupts the varroa mite's reproductive cycle and keeps mite populations low without any intervention from us.
Why does that have anything to do with your honey?
Part 2: After the swarm leaves, a new virgin queen will emerge. But she's not the only queen that the hive made. Now, it's her primary objective to seek out her opponents and eliminate them, ensuring only the strongest, fastest, most viable queen is the one who leads the colony forward.
This natural selection means our hives are led by queens with genetics proven to thrive in our local conditions. When beekeepers artificially propagate, a large part of the Survival of the Fittest is bypassed. Not to mention, no brood break for the varroa mites.
Anyways, this was supposed to be a short post about natural beekeeping but it's easy for me to get carried away with talking about bees.
We are learning every day how to produce healthier bees, better foragers, and ultimately a richer, more complex honey.
We learn by watching the bees, doing what they do best.
