Local beekeeper offers a sweet way to buy Canadian

Buying Canadian? Simcoe County has a rich agricultural landscape, with beekeepers working year-round supporting the bees to make honey. 

One of the many farmers producing this source of sweetness is beekeeper Adam Ritchie, of Adam’s Honey in Victoria Harbour. As a lifelong nature-lover he started with one beehive to help with his personal gardening habits. By 2017, it became his full-time beekeeping business.

“They’re fascinating,” he says.

Also running a cattle farm, Ritchie is interested in bee biology and how different they are from mammals. Insects can grow exponentially, he says, and his appeal to the complex systems of beehives stems from his background in engineering.

“I realized after working inside for a long time that I liked working outside better. And I’ve always had an interest in agriculture.”

And it’s not the bees doing all the work either.

With the hives themselves weighing nearly a hundred pounds each, it’s a labourious task to harvest honey. Tending them includes manoeuvering the boxes that store the honey on and off the hives.

Adam’s Honey has 800 hives with staff handling between 200 to 300 hives a day.

“We have some equipment to help with that, but it’s heavy work,” he says.

Winter is far from a vacation period, since bees are active in their hive even throughout the colder months.

Ritchie explains that a heavy snowfall year may help provide them with insulation, but the cold prevents bees from leaving the hive. This year, his bees were inside from November to January without a break. It needs to be at least 10 degrees Celsius for them to fly.

On his Instagram page you can see a sunny day in January when they finally got to leave for a bathroom break. Throughout the colder months, many bees will perish and staff assist with removing them from the hive on warmer days.

“We lose somewhere between 30 and 40 per cent of them in the winter, in a good year only 15 per cent,” Ritchie explains, noting that last year was his worst when he lost 45 per cent of his bees.

He starts preparing his bees for winter in August and can determine how they look in the fall.

“The bees looked good when we wrapped them this year,” he says.

Each hive gets wrapped with a black cover, protecting it from the wind and absorbing as much heat from the sun as possible.

Manual production and packaging also occurs in the winter months. With sustainable efforts at the forefront of the business, Adam’s Honey offers a variety of products; beeswax candles, soap, salves and various honey options.

During the honey extraction process, “we cut the cap off but we preserve the comb,” he says, adding this means the bees don’t need to remake it every time.

Working alongside each other, summer is a busy time for the bees. It’s also the selling season for the business. Adam’s Honey sells nucleus colonies to other beekeepers and pollination services. 

A nucleus colony is established by raising a queen bee separately through a special process. An existing hive is split into two or three and she takes one.

“The role of the bees in the hive is so specific, you need a queen and 3,000 bees for them to survive,” says Ritchie.

He mentions that a positive aspect of beekeeping is awareness of the natural world. A negative side is that the costs of upkeep are the same in a good year or a bad year and depends a lot on the weather.

“When your (way of) living is linked to nature and the sequence of things you learn pretty quickly,” he says, noting the influence of different flowers on the taste of wildflower honeys.

Ritchie can distinguish honeys from the taste or even the pollen bees return to the hive with. As an example, cranberry blossom honey is floral, has a delicate flavour and is light in colour.

As a local business, Adam’s Honey tries to keep costs reasonable while balancing inflation.

“There was a time when our honey was quite a bit more than in the grocery store,” he notes.

Now, it may be easier to support local beekeepers, as the cost to purchase honey from both near or far is more comparable.

“We’re lucky that we produce a nice or multi-floral honey here in Ontario that doesn’t exist in other places. There’s a reason to buy local to support local, but the product is good, too,” he says.