At Capital Bees our happy place is the bee yard. And with a lot of hard work and the incredible biodiversity at Just Food Community Farm, we’ve made sure it’s a happy place for our bees as well. It starts with breeding gentle, disease-resistant bees that thrive in our climate, and then we put a lot of work into making sure they stay healthy with regular brood checks, probiotics, and importantly, good nutrition.
It may look a little wild at times, but we’ve intentionally filled our bee yard with an abundance of nectar producing plants that the bees love! Their widely varied diet doesn’t just make for a beautifully complex honey—it also contributes to our girls’ gut health, nutrition, and social immunity. Like humans, bees need a diet of a wide variety of plant foods to ensure that their gut bacteria are strong—the healthier their gut flora, the stronger their immune systems will be when they encounter stress or pathogens. This is why we make sure that we don’t take too much honey for them to get through the winter (we want each hive to be about 100lbs in the fall!) instead of taking it all and feeding them back sugar syrup to replace it.
These nectar producing plants are our favourites too, for the beauty of the flowers, or the beautiful fruits that they provide, or their wonderful herbal benefits. As I was harvesting herbs after a long day with the bees, I realized, what a gift that some of their favourite nectar plants around the hives are also mood enhancing for us! Balancing and uplifting mood and memory, relieving anxiety, depression, mental fatigue and even allergy symptoms, these plants are one more gift that this piece of land has given to us.
So, we’ve harvested a little piece of our happy place to bring an uplifting, stress-busting cup of herbal tea to yours. And because we love egregious puns in this house, we named it Nectar & Chill 🙂
We’ll be bringing out our tea alongside our honey and a few perennial plants we’ve grown at Seedling Saturday this weekend!
