Visit Bistro 45 to collect your jar of our purely natural honey today!
Glencoe Honey is produced and collected on the grounds of The Glencoe Golf & Country Club. The Glencoe Horticulture team have kept the bee hives producing honey since 2018. We hope you enjoy your very own bottle of Glencoe honey!
ABOUT THE HIVES
The Club currently has three hives and pending hive health in Spring 2024, we will expand by two more hives. The Horticulture team inspects the hives regularly for queen health and laying ability before honey flow begins in June.The Hive consists of:
The next layer above the brood supers is a thin metal grate called the ‘queen excluder’ which ensures the queen lays eggs only where we want her to. Worker bees are the only bees small enough to move through the queen excluder. When worker bees forage (gather resources), they bring the honey through the brood supers and up into the honey supers on the top of the hives. Adding more honey supers to the hive can make some hives very tall.
Honey supers are where the honey is stored until extraction. Honey flow starts in June and goes through August.
EXTRACTING THE HONEY
Extracting the honey is a process that takes place from July to August. The Horticulture teams splits this process up to breakup the strenuous workload of extracting honey, and to ensure the Culinary Services team has fresh honey to use in Westmoor Terrace + Tap during the season.This process is done during a warm afternoon. The team goes out and selects the honey supers and places them on their side to allow bees to leave through the evening. This is a gentler process than brushing all the bees off the frames at once and allows them to leave on their own.
The team then preheats the harvest room (located in a building close to the Practice Facility) the morning of harvest. The room will reach between 21-27 degrees Celsius as the honey flows best at this temperature. The next morning, exactly 24 hours later, the team grabs the honey supers from the bee yard while it’s still cool outside and the bees are sleeping.
The honey supers are brought to the heated harvest room, and the team starts to remove the capping on the individual frames. Capping is a type of wax that the bees produce to preserve the honey until it is ready to extract, also called a honey comb.
When four frames are uncapped, they are placed in a 4-frame centrifuge, a barrel with metal frames that spins to extract the honey. The honey comes out of the frames and slides down into the extractor valve at the base of the centrifuge. This can be closed and opened to control the flow of honey through the strainer.
The honey is first strained through a double strainer with two sizes of mesh, to take the large particles of wax out. Then strained again through a small-holed sieve to remove finer pieces. The honey is collected into 5-gallon pails.
The warm heated honey is then strained a third time through a fine nylon mesh screen strainer that meets international standards for honey purity. This is then collected into 3-gallon pails.
Once all honey has been extracted and strained, it is then packaged into smaller jars available for purchase in Bistro 45 and into pails for the Culinary Services team to use in ingredients on the Westmoor Terrace + Tap menu. All packaged honey is stored in a cool room to form.
HONEY PRODUCTION
The average honey production at The Glencoe Golf & Country Club over the last three seasons in total is 23 gallons (equal to 87 litres or 264 pounds) of honey. The Alberta average is 13.6 gallons (equal 52 litres or 114 pounds) per year. Some operations in Alberta and Saskatchewan can pull 300 pounds of honey per hive per year. The prairies are known for producing large quantities of high-quality honey based on the bees having access to Canada’s highest population of canola farms and alfalfa plants.HONEY FLAVOURS
Did you know there are different flavours of honey? Bees like to group honey gathered from the same plants together on the same honey super. This means honey can be harvested for individual flavours. Each year the honey will be a little bit different based on the plants around and the time of year that the honey is harvested.- Spring Clover Honey: very light and cloudy, industry standard is ‘white’, and floral - very sweet and good for desserts.
- Summer Canola Honey: yellow and clear, industry standard ‘amber’, typical Alberta honey, a bit of an after bite crystallizes fast.
- Summer Thistle Honey: light yellow, industry standard ‘amber’, and floral well balanced.
- Autumn Goldenrod Honey: dark clear yellow, industry standard ‘dark amber’, good after bite more medicinal tasting.
- Autumn Aster Honey: dark cloudy orange-brown industry standard ‘dark’, unique flavour profile that is floral sweet and medicinal, very little of this has been harvested and is usually mixed with goldenrod honey.
HONEY BEE FUN FACTS
- Bees will fly collectively as much as 80,000 km (twice around the world or about the distance of 9,500 rounds of golf) and visit as many as two million flowers to produce one pound of honey!
- One teaspoon of raw local honey a day or one teaspoon of raw local pollen daily will help alleviate seasonal pollen allergies.
- Honey has enzymes added from the workers bees and when it’s cured and sealed in a jar will never go bad. For example, honey found in Egyptian tombs was still good 3000 years later!
- Mead is traditionally wine or beer made with honey.
- During drought years with nectar death, honeybees will extract sugars from berries.
DEFINITIONS
DRONES- Are fed ‘bee bread’ as larvae
- Don’t have stingers
- Largest and widest bees in the hive
- Huge eyes to find queens' mid flight
- Must be fed by the workers (don’t have the right mouth parts)
- Don't overwinter with the hive
- Very gentle
WORKERS
- Are fed ‘beebread’ as larvae
- Have a barbed stinger that detaches when used
- Their ‘current’ hive job depends on their age and genetics
- Finish their lifecycle as forage bees in summer
- Summer bees live for 15-38 days
- Winter bees, with furry winter coats live for 150-200 days to keep the hive warm over winter
- Are capable of laying eggs if the hive is queen-less but will only produce drones
QUEENS
- Are fed royal jelly produced by young workers - this makes them develop into queens
- Therefore, workers can perform an emergency re-Queening if young enough eggs and larvae are present
- Won’t sting you even when held in a closed palm
- Have a barbless stinger used for preventing succession from developing queens
- longest bee in the hive - to lay eggs down at the bottom of the comb
- Her genetic and personality traits influence the hive personality
- The mating flight is the only time queens intentionally take flight
- Mate 5-7~ times = more genetics = diversified workers for many different jobs
- Can live for 6 years
- Most commercial apiaries replace queens every 2-3 years max - for huge populations and honey production
