The honey I poured on my toast this morning was once in a flower in a summer field. The honey was tended to by a bee and its 10,000 sisters and involved a million miles of flight to create this jar of honey. In a grand performance choreographed by nature, the contents of this jar represent an act so fine, so precise, happening every day all across the land. It really was an act of pure magic.

This taste of honey is a golden gift of the gods for you this morning with your coffee, toast, and scrambled eggs.
What could be more beautiful than a baby bee on a honeycomb of gold, wings open, ready to fly? Head and body are natural gem amber-colored citrine with a six-sided cell filled with honey-colored gold, waxed over in pure white diamonds.
With your flower gardens and fields filled with flowers, you become a contributor. Let the honey touch your tongue, and you will know the taste of heaven.

Our Beekeeper’s Story
Andy is Our Store’s Head Beekeeper
Andy had acquired bees for the first time. He bought a bee suit for himself, and he bought a bee suit for his son Andy and his grandson Andy. Andy had just bought his first shipment of bees when, a few weeks in, his son Andy, a carpenter working for a construction company, called and asked to borrow his bee suit. Andy Junior explained they were working on remodeling a Portland church, and it was rumored to have bees in the purple room in the bell tower. Andy Junior had volunteered to open the wall and take care of the bees.
Andy Junior opened the wall and found thousands of bees. The wall was packed with honeycombs dripping with honey. He opened two more walls in the four-wall room and found an astonishing quantity of honey. Six totes were filled with 50-80 pounds each to clear the honey out.

I asked Andy in his years of beekeeping what he’s learned. He told me:
1) Not to be afraid of bees. Bees don’t want to sting you.
2) You never swat or panic. You always move slowly. You never run.
3) Bees will land on you…they are just landing. They are at peace. You must be, too.
Andy purifies and bottles his honey. The name of his honey on the jars is A’s & Bees. The A’s are for three Andys. The bees…you know.

Three Types of Honey Bees
in a Hive:
The Worker, the Drone, and the Queen
There are three types of honey bees within a hive: the queen, the workers, and the drones. A queen bee is the only female bee in the hive that gets to reproduce. Worker bees are all female and are all offspring of the queen. There are males in the hive called drones. The drone bee’s only purpose is to mate. After mating, the drone bee will die immediately.
Is There a King Bee?
There’s no such thing as a “King Bee” in wildlife. A honeybee queen is the single most important bee in a colony, as she produces the entire population of a colony.
All Bees, Except the Queen, are Baby Bees.
The average lifespan for a healthy worker bee when all is going well is somewhere around 4 to 6 weeks. The period begins when the bee emerges from her brood cell and ends when she lives out her month or month-and-a-half lifespan.
What is so remarkable about bees is all they accomplish in such a short time that these daughters build brooding cells and create honey cells all from special wax. What’s also remarkable is that they travel out on such short, fast wings to flowers 50 feet, and up to five miles away to collect pollen to make honey.
How much flying to make one pound of honey? 90,000 miles, or three times around the globe to make one pound of honey. An amazing feat for a team of newborn babies to accomplish just weeks after birth.
