As we get later into the harvest season we may think about tree fruits like apples, hardy vegetables like pumpkins and potatoes and of course, grapes, many of which are turned into wine in British Columbia. There is one other product to consider, a very sweet, natural product that also gets turned into an alcoholic beverage: Honey. At Tugwell Creek Honey Farm and Meadery just outside of Sooke on Southwest Vancouver Island you can tour the facilities used for extracting honey and fermenting mead. Beekeeper and meadmaker Bob Liptrot is happy to talk about what goes on there when beehives are brought in for processing in late summer and early fall.
Every hive contains a series of frames that hold honeycombs full of honey. Bob can harvest the comb and sell it in small packages, or he lifts the hives close to the ceiling of his extraction building and cracks them open there, close to the extractor. He puts up to 20 frames inside this extractor which spins around and around with centrifugal energy. "The honey is driven to the sides of the extractor and drips down to the sump, where the wax floats on top and the honey falls to the bottom. Then I can filter it for packing in small jars for sale, or divert it to our fermenting tanks for making mead."
One spin of a fully loaded extractor can yield about 30 to 40 kilograms of honey at a time. Each batch of honey can take on the characteristics of the kinds of flowers the bees are feeding on. The hives are taken out from the farm to and placed in areas up to 25 or 30 kilometres away where Bob can find high concentrations of blackberry, salal or fireweed plants, for example.
Bob Liptrot was almost born into beekeeping. Well, he did get a few years of being a kid before he started learning about bees and honey when he was six years old in East Vancouver. "Yeah, I was sort of conscripted child labour," he laughs. "When I was in grade school, I used to walk back and forth to school past a neighbour who was a beekeeper. He was an old Scotsman who knew the value of free help, so he would get me to help him and if I was lucky he would give me a piece of honeycomb to eat. I was scraping hives, painting them, getting them ready for the next season, extracting honey, filling jars. The only thing I couldn't do because I was so small was lift the 30 or 40 kilo hives off their bases!"
Bob really ‘got the bug’ so to speak, and embarked on a career as an entomologist, a bug scientist, and always kept bees as a hobby, until he and his wife decided to move to Vancouver Island to set up the farm at Tugwell Creek.
Fermented honey makes mead, and it was a natural progression for Bob Liptrot to start experimenting with mead having all that honey around, and he’s been very successful in developing a very nice line of meads, just as a winemaker develops different products from his grapes. The recipe for one, the Wassail Gold, goes back to the mid-1500’s. In addition to the honey there are six different spices mixed in…the recipe was created by the Dutch East India Company when it was trying to promote the use of spices in Europe, and at the time only the aristocracy could afford it.
The honey industry on Vancouver Island took a real hit this past winter…85 percent of the bee colonies on Vancouver Island were wiped out last winter, at Tugwell they lost about 60 percent of their bees. That left beekeepers scrambling to replace the bees with a safe alternative, many of them imported packages of bees from New Zealand using a bee supplier in Nanaimo, and another major honey producer on the Island petitioned the provincial government to lift a moratorium on hive imports to Vancouver Island. That move has created a good deal of controversy. If you want to read more, check out this story in the Globe and Mail, the Island Bees website, and this story on A, a Victoria TV station. For more info on Tugwell Creek products and their availability, visit their homepage.
