Why Our Hives Sit on Organic Farms

Every hive we keep sits on an organic farm around Idaho’s Treasure Valley, by agreement with the farmer who works that ground. That’s all 500 or so of them, and it’s where the honey comes from.

I don’t make exceptions to that, and it’s the reason a few things about how we run are harder than they need to be. This letter is about why I do it and what it costs.

How a hive works

A hive eats whatever grows where you set it down. Bees fly out from the box, forage on what’s there, and bring it home. Honey is what they brought back.

So what’s in a jar of honey gets decided before anybody touches a frame. It gets decided the day somebody picks where the hive goes.

There’s no step later that undoes that. Straining and not heating are the easy part, and I do both. Placement is the part that takes real work.

If a hive sits somewhere that gets sprayed, whatever got sprayed is in the forage. The forage is in the honey, in the wax and in the pollen. You can’t strain that out afterward.

What the arrangement is

The farmer gets their crops pollinated. I get somewhere clean to put bees. Most of the time nobody writes anybody a check.

It’s worked out one farm at a time, because every farm is different. What’s grown, when it flowers, how much room there is, what else is happening that season. There’s no standard agreement I can copy from one farm to the next.

That’s the cost of the rule. A beekeeper who isn’t fussy can put hives on any patch of ground somebody will let them use, and that takes an afternoon. I have to find farmers who are already farming the way I need, then sit down with each one.

About 500 hives is a lot of conversations. It’s also well past the point where Idaho makes a beekeeper register with the state Department of Agriculture. The line is 50 colonies.

What the bees get out of it

I care about this part at least as much as the honey.

Bees are livestock, and where you keep livestock decides how they do. Setting a hive somewhere it’ll get poisoned so you can pull a crop off it is not a way I’m willing to keep bees.

It turned out that wanting good honey and wanting to look after the bees is the same job. The placement that gives clean forage is the placement that doesn’t kill bees. I didn’t land on that as a nice thought afterward. It’s just how it works.

Why I don’t name the farms

I don’t name the farms, to anybody.

They’re somebody else’s business, and the arrangement is between me and them. A farmer who lets me put boxes on their ground didn’t sign up to be in my advertising. The first time I put a farm’s name on a website is the last time a new farmer says yes easily.

I also won’t say how many hives are on any one farm or where any of them are. Same reason, plus there’s equipment sitting out in fields.

That makes the claim harder to check, and I know it. I’d rather you take it on trust than have a farmer feel used.

Why I don’t call it organic honey

I don’t call this organic honey, because that phrase gets used loosely and I don’t want to add to it.

Bees fly for miles. Nobody can certify where a bee went or fence off where it forages. That’s why honey certification is complicated and argued over, and why I don’t claim it.

What can be certified is the ground the hive sits on. That’s the thing I’m telling you. The farm is organic. The hive is on the farm. What the bees do from there is up to the bees, and anyone who tells you different is selling something.

It’s a narrower claim than a marketing department would write. It’s the one I can back up.

The same rule covers the wax

Everything I said about the honey goes for the wax, and a little more so.

Bees build wax out of what they bring home, and wax is where the fat-soluble stuff collects. A hive in a sprayed field makes wax that carries it, and wax ends up in candles people burn indoors and in balms people put on their skin, including mine.

So the placement rule isn’t really a honey rule. It covers everything that comes out of a hive. If you’re buying wax for your own recipes, the whole beeswax page is here, and the wax that goes into our own lotion comes off these same hives.

What the rule doesn’t cover

A claim is only worth something if you know its edges, so these are the three edges of this one.

Bees fly. The usual working figure is two or three miles out from a hive, and inside that circle are roads, ditches, gardens and whatever the next farm over is doing. I control where the box sits. I don’t control the whole foraging range, and nobody does.

Organic is a farming standard, not a purity guarantee. It limits what a farm can use on the ground. It doesn’t put a dome over the field. What it does mean is that the ground under my hives is worked by somebody who already decided how they want to farm, and that’s the biggest thing I can actually influence.

And this is about placement, not processing. It says nothing about what happens after the honey comes off, which is a separate and much shorter list.

I’d rather spell those limits out than let the word organic do work it can’t do. The claim is narrow. Every hive we own sits on ground somebody farms organically, by agreement, and I picked every one of those places on purpose.

What I’m not claiming

I’m not claiming the honey is medicine. I’m not claiming it’ll do anything for your allergies, and there’s a whole letter about why.

I’m not claiming a floral variety either. The hives sit on different farms with different crops, and I haven’t had any of it tested.

What I am claiming is one thing. I know where every hive is, and I chose every one of those places for the same reason. What happens to the honey after that is raw, unfiltered and never heated, and that letter is a lot shorter than this one.