Spring Is in the Air

Since I am fielding calls quite frequently about bees swarming here and there, I thought I’d do a quick post on a few things that I have found interesting so far this week. First of all, a few words about swarms – they are not necessarily cause for alarm, folks! Bees are actually quite gentle in this state for several reasons. Simply put, they have no home at this point to defend and they are actually quite full of honey so who cares about stinging people. They’ve got to look for a home all while clustered around their queen to keep her safe. That’s right. She’s in the middle of all the bees you might see hanging from a tree, fence, building, air conditioning unit (yep, remember when Mark removed one a few years ago?) or some such place. Usually they will stay only a few days or until they find a new home. While most of the bees are clustered, some scout bees will venture about seeking the perfect space to make their home. Somewhere closed typically so that it’s easily defended. Anyhow, just wanted you to know this is happening right now so you know what it is and why you don’t need to panic. Next topic…

Isn’t she adorable!? When Mark showed me this picture, he knew what my reaction would be – delight. He knows me. I was delighted for sure. She was covered in pollen! She must have rolled all around the flowers. lol They can be so silly and so much like children in my opinion. I love to hear about them and see what they are doing. If you can’t see the bee with pollen dust, look in the upper left quadrant of the photo and see if you can spot the one bee with wings that look mustardy. That’s her. 🙂

In other bee-related news, we got moves going on left and right. Yep, the bees are getting shuffled around. We don’t actually move our hives around too much but when conditions warrant it, it happens. This particular move below was several hives going from the Big Oaks nursery to the Gonzales bee yards. You know how we love the Gonzales honey so here’s hoping they have a great year. I just had some Gonzales Wildflower in my cup of coffee – oh my it was delish. I sometimes forget just how smooth that county honey is – not sure why but it doesn’t seem to crystalize as quickly either. Too bad we didn’t make a lot of it last honey season – this jar was in my reserve. It pays to know the beekeeper, eh? By the way, the ice you see helped keep the bees cool during the drive as it was in the mid-80s that day. We don’t want them overheating while sitting on the truck. They made it just fine.

Tomorrow Mark and Stan will move more bees – this time from Runge to a new yard they will establish in…wait for it…wait…BIGFOOT!! Finally! I get to write about Bigfoot; got to love that name. Here’s the sign I snapped when we visited the first time –

It had such a neat feeling to it. Can’t wait to see what honey is like there. The farm we will be on is amazing. Well, the owner and his crew are what make it amazing. I have a Frio County Farm Visit Flickr set (of course) in case you want to see what the area looks like. We loved it and we can’t wait to work the bees down there! And a word about why we’re moving the bees: There isn’t much for the bees to feed on right now in Runge and they are looking pretty sad. We need to move them somewhere they’ll have some food so they won’t starve to death. This is what you do. You watch and care for them and you help them when they need you, which may not be often but this is a prime example. Sometimes we have people call us and ask our opinion about their hives. Sometimes we can help, sometimes it’s too late. Sometimes something could have been done to help the bees if intervention came sooner. So, here’s some advice for our new beekeepers – get in your hives on a regular basis. If you don’t know exactly when to check on them, at least read this blog or other beekeeper blogs and do what they do. When they check hives, you check hives. When they feed, you feed. When they treat for mites, you treat for mites. 🙂 One of the best ways to learn is to do. So open up those hives and keep an eye on your gals! And few guys.

Okay, I think that’s about it for now. Not bad for a mid-week post. 🙂 Now, I have candles to wrap for market. Lots of candles. Yay! OOOOOH! Forgot to tell y’all that we sold our first bucket o’ unrefined wax to a company that specializes in some very nice looking beauty care products. We’ll let you know how things progress. ALSO…we have signed on to be a participant at the Artisan’s Market being hosted by the La Cantera William-Sonoma! Exciting! More on that soon. It’ll be on a Saturday (April 27) from noon to 4:00 p.m. Can’t wait to share all the varieties of honey with folks and we hope to see as many of YOU ALL out there! That’d be awesome!

Okay, for real this time. Goodnight. 🙂

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Dogs, Grits and the A-Team – All at Markets

We had a great weekend that capped one of the most hectic and stressful weeks in a long time; hence the lack of blogging for so long (sorry). First things first – we closed on the old Bee Ranch! Woohoo! Now there’s funding for the new Honey House and so we continue the process of platting the land and preparing to build. As much as we loved our last home, we sure are glad that’s all done and over. Hope the new owners enjoy it as much as we did! That was Friday morning. Then in the afternoon we did our usual preparations for market except this time, we prepped for two. In addition to the Pearl that we enjoy so much, we did our first Sunday morning at the Quarry Farmers & Ranchers Market – had a GREAT time! We had as much fun as we do at the Pearl. As a matter of fact, several vendors from Pearl are also at the Quarry. And there’s always a parade of pooches. 🙂 Our favorites are currently at the Pearl, especially the Great Danes. Check out Harley in the shot below. If we saddled her, I’m thinking Lan and I could each ride her around. lol big, sweet Harley. We’re learning lots about dogs and their owners.

Okay, so about the grits – mmmmm! I love grits and it’s hard to find great grits. That being said, I can get the Shrimp & Grits Crepe on Saturday (Thanks, CrepeLandia!) and then a Kiss My Grits on Sunday (Nice to meet you Winner Winner Chicken Dinner!). I am one happy girl.

And that brings me to the A-Team. Stan is joining us on an-ongoing basis at the Quarry so I can have a bit of a break. He and Mark make a great team and Stan’s learning many aspects of our little bee biz and we sure appreciate his help! Plus he’s so much fun so y’all be sure to swing by either market and meet and get to know Stan. Welcome to the family Stan (and family!). 🙂

And by break, I mean some time to tend to the home and things like groceries and so on. And though I still need things like breakfast juices and milk from the local HEB, we are really enjoying meeting and bartering with fellow vendors. The vegetables are amazing and now I have added handmade pastas, pestos and bread to the mix. What a wonderful life. What a pleasure to know who grew and made your food. It’s exactly what we want to do with our products and we’re happy people are so supportive and appreciative of our products and work with the bees. You can view more pictures on my Flickr page if you’d like.

In addition to all that, we have been trying to stuff as much “stuff” into the little brown candle shop at the new house and into the garage. Until we get the new HH built, things will be a bit crazy and spread out but at least it’s all at one house so that’s a much better situation – saves time since we don’t have to drive back and forth as we have been since September. We’re also developing new packaging, waiting on more candle molds (since Mark can’t keep up with demand between orders, walk-in customers and markets), filling orders, orders, orders, and planning for picking up more hives from East Texas…the usual stuff. 🙂 Busy, busy. There’s definitely an increase in orders and we are very thankful! Speaking of which, before I leave you, I want to share with you, a look at our new labels we just got Saturday. We love them! Easy to peel and stick and they add a very nice finished touch to our packaging. Okay, off I go to gift wrap beeswax hearts and Saddle Bag gift boxes. If you need host/hostess, coworker or teacher gift for the holidays, we hope you’ll give us a call. Heck, if you just want a gift for yourself, give us a call. :-p See you later.

Here’s the Saddle Bag gift box – $18 a box. I’m happy to say all the ones I made for the trial run at Quarry Market were bought up by some happy customers who needed ready-to-go gifts. Happy they chose us to gift.

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Open House & Holiday Season

Well, we had a blast at Sunday’s Open House and already can’t wait for the next one! Hopefully by that time, the new Honey House will be completed as well as a retail space in the front of the property. We’ll see. 🙂 We want to thank everyone who came by to visit and also those who sent well wishes when they couldn’t join us. We really do appreciate the support and as Mark told a customer earlier, every single purchase means a lot to us as we grow our little business. Things are picking up now that the holidays are fully upon us. Even in our house I have Christmas tunes on as we work this evening. Smokey is out cold on the sofa. I love our cozy home.

During the Open House, we had fun showing folks our products and then of course the bees in the back yard. Everyone loves the bees and we love how gentle they are so that we can take people so close with little worry about attacks and stings. No one even needed a suit. I think that surprised many people. We love turning them onto to gentle honey bees. Nice when we can win fans over. We had one brave young man join us that day so that he could overcome his fear of them. He did fantastic! He said he’s no longer bothered by them and that made us happy to hear. Makes the work all worth it when people really begin to understand how gentle they can be if managed properly here in Texas.

We also enjoyed showing them where we plan to have the temporary bottling tanks and the beeswax equipment and candle making table. We’ve decided to keep the garage a fulltime shop. I’ve lived this long without a garage to park in, what’s another six months or so as we build the HH. I told Mark let’s go for it. It’s already a lot more room than we had in the honey house for storage and a retail space. We’ll make it work. If you would like to see the full set of Holiday Open House pictures, just just click here and have a look.

As I mentioned earlier, we are also gearing up for the holidays with more baskets and gift sets in addition to the usual honey and candles we package and ship. Now that we are at the Pearl every Saturday, we also regularly accept orders via the web and then people have the option to pick up at the Pearl. That’s working out well. Speaking of which, I have so much to share with y’all!

First of all, we are joining the Quarry Farmers & Ranchers Market every Sunday morning, 9a-1p. Yep! You can check out their website and then come visit us sometime. We are looking forward to it even though that’s about the last day we had free to rest, go to church and get chores done at home. However, Mark has heard my concerns about fatigue and he’s giving me a break – Stan will be helping us out at the Quarry so that I may take a break once in a while to get things done for the home. What a guy I have. 🙂 Lucky me. Hopefully, one day soon, I can help Mark full time and that would make it a lot better. Anyway – visit with us! It looks like a neat market environment and we are super thrilled to be accepted into the mix. We are totally enjoying access to fresh eggs, meats and veggies. AND awesome eats and then there’s the food (CrepeLandia’s at both Pearl and Quarry – woohoo for the Shrimp & Grits Crepe!)!

Secondly, we will be at the annual Yulefest at the Seguin Coliseum this coming Sunday. You can catch us there from 10a to 4p. We will have plenty of our products there as we have a double booth again this year. 🙂 I may even do some shopping myself as there are some nice vendors there with us. So, come do your Christmas shopping with some locals!

Thirdly, we got a new bee net! Our first one to own. In the past, when we’ve picked up bees, we borrowed friends’ nets. It was time to plop down some serious money for our own net. It was huge and heavy! I wanted to pick it up so you could have some relative size comparison. Don’t you love how Smokey photo-bombed me? Crazy kitty.

Fourthly (is that a word?), Mark went and got some more beeswax today! Thanks to the increased movement of our beeswax products, we’ve about doubled our beeswax on hand and in the coming year, we anticipate producing quite a bit of our own with our increase in hives. Mark will start processing it pretty soon as we need a LOT more candles for the holidays. Good thing more candle molds are also on order.

Okay, I guess that’s a good wrap of things for now. I don’t want to overwhelm people. I have gift boxes to make now. Goodnight and sleep tight. ❤

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We’re Ready for Holiday Open House

Well, we are finally cleaned up and ready for bed. But not before I post a little on what we’ve been doing. I was wondering earlier about all the “famous and successful” businesses that started out in garages. You know, I’m too tired to go Google it and I have set a time limit on how late I can stay up to write this so I’ll keep moving. You know what I mean about the garage. We all have to start and sometimes restart somewhere and here’s where we’re at – our new Bee Ranch at 2745 W. Kingsbury. We’re now on the edge of town. Feels like the country sometimes since we are no longer about ten feet from our neighbors and we regularly have deer grazing on and running through the front to the back yard and then on to the eleven acres behind our property. 🙂 We will miss the good ole house on Krezdorn and people will have to adjust their coordinates for picking up our products, but we are really just ten minutes from where we used to be and right down the street from Interstate 10 AND Granzin’s Meat Market. What more could you ask for?

So, here’s your chance to see our restart. The Krezdorn house is under contract now, which means we seriously need to start emptying out the Honey House (not to mention our attic, still). When it came time to decide about events such as daily drop-bys from customers and the open house event, it seemed like the right time to go ahead and transition things over to the new Bee Ranch. We are happy to say we had our first shoppers stop by for BLACK FRIDAY shopping – we weren’t even having any specials but they sure didn’t mind. We appreciated their support as well as another big order I took over the phone. It’s that gift-giving time of year and we’re happy people are picking up our honey and wax products for family and friends. Tomorrow we’ll open our garage doors for any of you who’d like to do a little shopping, a little visiting and a little munching. We’ll have light snacks and some hot cider. Mark and I will be happy to show you our vision for the new Bee Ranch – Where will the honey house sit? Where might the retail shop be located? Where will Mark make his gorgeous candles? Where will Stan bottle honey? Which boots will I wear to tromp around the property in search of photo opportunities? If you swing by here tomorrow, we can show you where all this and more will happen. AND Smokey will be so happy to see you! He may run around the yard in a frenzy from the joy of having people visit us again. I think he’s really missed seeing people for classes and drop-by customers. Poor cat, like Lan and I don’t give him enough attention and snuggles.

Here’s a look at some of the handiwork from setup activities this evening. We just want to say a great big THANK YOU to my sis Lan. Boy, she is a worker bee to the max. Helped us out at the Pearl Farmers Market then came to Seguin in the evening to hang out and help us set up for tomorrow. We love working with family members and have enjoyed her feedback in addition to her hard work. We even had a video call with my other sis Thuy in NC to show her what we were doing – she loves our products and events as much as we do although today she told me that she thinks she gets more excited about our Pearl adventures than I do. How lovely that so many people, especially family members, care so much about what we do and how we do that they text and call afterwards to see how things went. It’s so awesome!

Okay, I’ve exceeded my time limit by three minutes. Oops. Gotta go to bed now so y’all sleep tight and come visit us!

Oh! The bees are here also! I know a lot of you love to see them. So there. Okay, this time I am really stopping. 🙂

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Market, Class, Chocolates, Holiday Open House – It’s All Here!

After another busy week and another two-event day, I am in my pajamas already and Smokey is crashed out on his current favorite spot while he is recovering from some injury he picked up while I was gone. Poor little guy. I bet if he was able to join bee class this morning, that would have cheered him up. Lan and I handled the Pearl market as Mark had seven students join him for class here in Seguin. Ah, I miss doing the classes with Mark. While we are blessed to be so busy and to have so many new opportunities, we always miss working events together. Sigh. The price of success I guess. 🙂 Here’s a shot from class today.

At least we have the evenings together. Tonight we were suppose to go to a Chucho Valdez concert and we were both so excited but unfortunately, I was really exhausted and an earlier migraine post-market really wiped me out (even after sleeping it off for three hours). Mark is pretty beat as well so we thought it’d be best to not push it by rushing to SA to catch Chucho. We’ll have to catch him again when we can. 😦 Instead, we had a nice, quiet dinner out and now we are both doing a bit of administrative work as we watch the Spurs beat up on the Denver Nuggets. AND we are sipping on some yummy hot chocolate topped with marshmallows and a touch of cinnamon AND we are nibbling on the delicious Texas Honey Caramel Truffles that Ms. Chocolatier dropped off at our booth today at market. They are a fellow vendor at the Pearl and they used some of our honey in this magnificent creation. Has a touch of sea salt on top – SCRUMPTIOUS. Is chocolate on chocolate too much? Impossible.

One ore thing…guess what time it is? Besides turkey time, it’s time for our annual Holiday Open House! I know, it feels like it was just yesterday that we were all trying to keep warm and dry in the tiny little Honey House on Krezdorn while it poured down cold rain on Seguin last year. Right? Well, here we are again. Gearing up for holiday shoppers who have already started placing their orders. We’d love to see you here at our new Bee Ranch on Kingsbury. We’ll have some yummy, light snacks and plenty of time to talk gift-giving ideas with you if you have time to shop local with us.

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A Visit to North Carolina

Just because I’m away visiting family doesn’t mean I’m away from the bee biz or that I’ve stopped working on it from afar. And here, I have help! 🙂 I am in NC with my sister and her family for the week. Miss Mark, Smokey and the homestead but it’s good to be here with Thuy. This is us today – heading out to vote! Woohoo!

As you can tell, we are a little bundled up – more so than I would be in Texas. That’s because it was 37 degrees this morning when I took my nephew to school. I love this cold weather; it makes me more energetic. And I get to wear scarves. I know this has not much to do with honey or beeswax but I’m getting there.

Okay, so while here I am working my day job still and helping around the house with errands while my sister recuperates. However, she is very active so when she’s not resting, she’s talking bee biz with me which is really a lot of fun. She also happens to be one of our biggest supporters so she continues to gift away goodies and also spreads the word about Mark’s beekeeping. We love her for her enthusiasm! lol Thuy has helped me with some display and packaging ideas for the upcoming holiday shopping ideas. Here are some examples you may be seeing real soon in Texas…

Candle take-out

Here’s a look inside

Candle display plate

Another favorite of Thuy’s

And believe it or not, I actually got to be here when some of our boxes arrived so that I could see how the recipients see our products when they arrive. Thuy ordered five baskets and some lotus flowers. Everything made it intact and the only significant thing I noticed was that one jar of honey in one of the baskets completely flip flopped over so that the labeled side was face down. Weird. Not sideways. Not caddywhompus. Just a 180-degree turn. Wonder how that happened.

And last but not least, I wanted to share that I managed to lug along eight honey samplers for the family so they can share with their friends anytime they wish to do so. That’s eight pounds of honey in a checked bag. I’m sure TSA was curious. Not to mention the two 8-oz gift jars. Luckily nothing leaked but I had each jar in a plastic bag at any rate. I’m sure they rummaged in there as usual. Remember, if you pack honey, they pretty much always inspect your bag. 🙂 Happy to say I’ve done two honey tastings already and I love to tell Thuy’s girlfriends about the bee biz we love so much. Thanks for sharing us out, Thuy!

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An Evening of Craftiness

There are few things more enjoyable than the sweet honey scent of our beeswax candles, especially when we have several lit at the same time. I love test burn time. 🙂 These are just a few of the lovely floating flower candles Mark has poured. What’s amazing to me is the long burn time, considering how small the core of the candle is if you really look at it. The chrysanthemum candle is giving us a pretty consistent burn at 2.5 hours while the lotus candle (my new favorite) is steady for a solid 3 hours. Very nice. And they look so nice in a bowl of water. If we had a pond or a pool, I would fill them with the candles! So romantic. 🙂

After my day job today, I went over to the Honey House to work on an order of custom made gift baskets for my lovely sister in NC. I mocked up three different baskets for our discussion. I love technology – we were able to collaborate via phone and we worked out which design she wanted. That was so fun. This one was my favorite because of the lotus flower. I just like the way it sits in the center of things. 🙂 It was fun to make the baskets; I need to get in the swing of it as we are gearing up for the holiday season and that’s when people want the baskets more than the rest of the year though we appreciate the orders we do get throughout the year for baskets as hostess gifts and so on. Speaking of which, I gave one to our friends at Springfield Farm last weekend when we went for a visit and I rather enjoyed gifting something that I know people will eat and use for light and warmth. It was just a good feeling. I love to gift our GBR goodies and I love it when people want to spread the word and the goods to their friends. It’s like paying forward the goodness of the bees if you think about it.

On the beekeeping front, Mark reports the following – the Honey House is quite navigable thanks to the hard work of our friend Stan. He has bottled quite a lot of honey and that means clearing out buckets and then stacks of buckets. He’s keeping us current on inventory so that we know when to order bottles, labels and whatever else we need. The main thing is really the space. It’s amazing how much less frustrating it is to work in the HH when you can actually move around! lol

Mark’s day included checking on Big Oaks queens that he put in about a week ago. Then he had to go back to the Pizza yard to put in another queen in that hive I told you about yesterday that had the dead queen in the cage. Today Mark did find another queen they had so it seems they must have had two queens when he installed the Heitkam queen. He did find one of the original queens and kill her but since he didn’t realize they had a second queen already, we think they must have killed the Heitkam queen. Poor thing.

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Our First SA Market & Another Mention in the Paper

It’s another wrap on another busy weekend for GBR. We had a GREAT time at the Pearl – Mark and I worked it together and had a blast. Other vendors helped us with our single tent – we always have trouble! I told Mark we need to drill setting up and breaking down the tent. He said that’s a great idea…in our spare time, we’ll do that. haha Anyway, it was well-organized and people actually politely waited until the official start bell rang before making us work the money exchange. It was hot and humid which will make us really appreciate the fall and winter I bet. At one point when we had a breather, Mark relieved me and manned the booth solo so I could do a quick run around to see what we might want from other vendors. I wanted everything! But I stuck with only cucumbers, tomatoes and some awesome peaches. Mark later got us a very yummy gluten-free strawberry crepe. AWESOME.

Later, after we had a crazy spell of non-stop talking, honey-tasting and money-swapping, Mark and I looked at each other and wondered what time it was. We both thought it was past 11:00 a.m. It was 9:53 a.m. lol It was insanely busy compared to other similar events we’ve attended. We loved it. And at the end of the morning, another vendor asked us how we did and said it was sort of a slow day. WOW. We far exceeded our expectations so I can’t imagine what a “busy” day would have been. Next weekend we’re back bright and early and we’ll have the help of my sister – retail queen. We are thrilled to have Lan joining us when she can. So great when our family members get excited about what we’re doing and want to help. We appreciate it so much and we enjoy having them be a part of things. It’s so fun and exciting!

And finally a word about being a foodie. Are you a foodie? Do you know a foodie? Have you ever heard of the word foodie? 🙂 I’m a foodie and if you haven’t figured that out, then you just haven’t been through my full Flickr account, especially my food set. If you look up foodie, you typically find definitions around the idea that a foodie is a “particular class of aficionado of food and drink.” I don’t believe in snobbery so I define foodie as anyone who appreciates food – the fine art of creating something delicious, something good for you, something that just takes your breath away when you look at it. That’s me. I sometimes let my food get cold because I took too many pictures. 🙂 Anyway, all that to say we got a nice mention in today’s foodie article in the Seguin Gazette. Nice picture, double chin and wet hair from the downpour. But who cares?? We got some additional mention in the paper and that’s always nice. I do want to say one thing after reading it – here at GBR, we never decrystalize any honey in the microwave. When people ask about what to do about it, we always explain the hot-water-in-a-pot-with-a-lid-on-it method. Works but you must be patient. Microwaving is iffy – burning is quite easy to do and it’s just best if you don’t. Anyway, I just wanted to clarify that we don’t use the microwave at all when it comes to honey. As a matter of fact, we don’t really have a problem with crystalized honey in this house. If you’ve read previous posts, you know what I do with crystalized honey! It’s the new “pearl cream” of the modern era!

Have a great week ahead, everyone!

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Pearl Farmers Market

It’s official – we’re heading to our first market with the Pearl folks in San Antonio. If you haven’t been to that area lately, you need to see all the wonderful things that are now where they use to brew beer at the Pearl Brewery. I am always impressed when I go by that area and see the development and improvements to the river there. The Pearl is worth checking out, if you haven’t already. Good eats, cool merchandise, beautiful river enhancements, awesome Culinary Institute of America bakery, and the farmers market on Saturday mornings. There’s even development for downtown living in progress there. If I’m gushing, it’s because I love what’s happening there and I will always love SA since it was my first taste of Texas living. The people are so nice – it’s what struck me when I came on my interview and subsequent visits. It will always be dear to me and I love to see SA growing and blossoming. Nothing pretentious, though. Just fun and genuine, in my opinion.

Okay, so why the picture above? For starters, I was excited that we got a new follower on Twitter (thanks for following us Pearl). But then Mark messaged me and said we had jumped up a bit with our Facebook fan count and I couldn’t understand why. We’re always curious about who likes us and how they heard about us. So I thought to check the Pearl page and look what I found – they mentioned us and linked us also. That explains the jump in number. 🙂 Which takes me back to one of the things we talk about anytime people ask us to present something on GBR – the importance of social media. It’s not a bad word (words) – like everything else in life, it has its ups and downs. Yes, you have to keep up with it. Yes, you have to be careful to strike that balance between sharing with people and maintaining some degree of privacy. Yes, it takes time and if you fake it most people will see through you. No, it does not have to be drama-filled.

Word-of-mouth business has helped us grow but social media, in the form of Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and our blog, has enhanced our online presence beyond our website. It’s a gorgeous website and we LOVE it (Thanks, Troy!). But we like the immediacy of sharing afforded by our FB posts, tweets and albums. It allows us to connect on a personal level with our customers and followers. With YOU. 🙂 We want you to know who we are and how we work and where your honey and candles come from. And the wonderful thing about other people connecting with us is that they connect us with their group of friends and followers. In this case, Pearl has over 11,000 followers. Makes our almost-400-followers seem so small right now. But that’s okay. I have reasonable social media goals. I want us to reach 500 before the holidays. Let’s see if we can do it.

So here’s where we’ll be every Saturday for a while. 8-12p during hot July and August and then back to the usual 9-1p the rest of the year. Personally, I’m also looking forward to having access to fresh produce and meats while we’re there. It was great the last time we visited as consumers.

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Class, Visitors, Home Inspection, Comb Honey, Blizzards

So, today was PACKED but I’m not going to bed until I write about it. So hold on. First we kicked off the day with class – our last class before we take a summer break so that we don’t have another you-attended-class-on-the-hottest-day-certificate class like last year. 🙂 We love our students but we just think a break during Texas summers is a great idea. Those bee suits do get hot. With a small class, we get to do different and more things…like let the students try their hands at uncapping honey frames. Very fun and nothing beats seeing exactly how the honey comes out of the frame and finally into a jar.

At the end of class we had visits from other beekeeping pals and new beekeeping friends. Want to learn more about Camaran and his awesome bee tattoo? Be sure to check back later this week because I want to devote an entire post to our friends and specifically Perez Beekeeping, which is run by Camaran and his wife Angelica from San Antonio. After the visitors left, we grabbed a quick PBH sandwich and booked on over to the new house we hope to purchase very soon. Had to meet with the inspector, owner and realtor. Thumbs up so far. We’ll keep you posted.

After the house visit, we booked back to the Bee Ranch for our next appointment of the day – a visit from Felicia of the Seguin Gazette. She is doing a story on GBR and the extraction process. We had a lot of fun showing her how things work and then took her through the honey-tasting. Story should run this week. We’ll share when it does.

Check out the samples…so yummy.

[Personal aside: Mark just found ENTER THE DRAGON on TV. I hope I can finish this before getting totally distracted by Bruce Lee.]

We wrapped up honey work for the day by filling up jars of comb honey for the JW Marriott crew – my gosh the bees made an awesome Bexar County Wildflower honey this year. We talked about it and agreed it’s almost as smooth as the Mesquite from here. That’s pretty great in my opinion (since it’s my favorite). Here’s to an even bigger crop next year!

And then we wrapped up our wonderful day with Blizzards from Dairy Queen (DQ). I would share a picture but both of the ones I snapped were not that useable and I didn’t get the affect I was going for and I couldn’t get them right with apps. Suffice it to say we were very happy with our treat and our day. Thanks, everyone, for your usual love and support. We love what we do but we love y’all even more. Tomorrow we do mostly non-bee work. Tell you more later.

Oh my gosh, I almost forgot – we have BIG news about what we’ll be doing every Saturday starting next week. 🙂 Teaser for tomorrow’s post. I promise.

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