Bee’s Gold Honey Shares Education & Sweet Treats
Bee’s Gold Honey Shares Education & Sweet Treats
To Bee or Not to Bee - Bee’s Gold Honey Owners Answer All Your Bee Keeping Questions
The slightly snowy Sunday was dank and dreary, warmed by the gracious geniality of Bee’s Gold Honey owners, Nadja and Fabio Pires and their elderly rescue furbaby, Jello. I was curious about the art of beehive keeping. The Pireses answered my bee questions, gave me tastes of their pure products and encouraged me to further pursue looking into hives of my own.
Nadja and Fabio came to Amherst from Brazil in 2006 after retiring there from Praxair, but then re-entering the job force when Fabio was sent to the U.S. as an engineer for Linde Air. They love the countryside, so naturally, they found themselves in Ellicottville at Holiday Valley, learning to ski. As those of us who have all too willingly succumbed to Ellicottville and the surrounding area’s charms, they too, fell in love and found the perfect country place on Steckman Road in Machias, minutes from the center of Ellicottville. What was more than perfect, although they did not realize it at that very moment, was that their property is in an area with very little farming (no chemical runoff), with marsh and forest and lots of wildflowers and trees. They wanted to care for living creatures, but even working remotely, they had only part-time to devote to their land. Alpacas, goats, and bunnies were out, so the natural choice was beekeeping.
“As we learned how valuable these little creatures are for our own existence on this planet, because they pollinate most of the crops we depend on for food, and also how much trouble they are in because of multiple threats, we made it our mission to try and help them survive and thrive as much as we can, hoping they will eventually overcome all the challenges they face,” states the couple.
The Pireses can be found at farmers markets in Buffalo and assorted events in both Erie and Cattaraugus County. They will have a popup at the 59th Annual Maple Festival this coming weekend, April 29th and 30th on Main Street in Franklinville. Their wares include summer and fall syrup (yes, they are different, both in color and taste, based on the seasonal local flowers and trees their bees visit), whipped honey crème and beautifully handcrafted cards created by Nadja, using natural flowers, weeds and grasses picked and pressed from their Machias property. She also uses these treasures from nature to skillfully adorn each paper bag that holds your chosen honey product. If you find yourself interested in starting hives of your own, or if you need more to add to your colonies, they also sell honeybee nucs and mated queens to be picked up from the farm in Machias from late May through August 2023. Nucs (Nucleus colonies) are small, fully functioning Northern honeybee colonies in a box with 5 deep frames (9” tall) containing a mix of bees of all stages and a mated laying queen.
Located at 8265 Steckman Road, Machias, phone 716.906.1758, you can also find them online at beesgoldhoney.com (remember the “s”), Instagram @beesgoldhoney1, or check their driveway sign. It will tell you if they are open.
BEE AND HONEY FACTS:
Honeybees are super-important pollinators for flowers, fruits, and vegetables.
They live in hives – 1 queen whose only job is to lay eggs and produce chemicals to guide other bees’ behavior. Workers (females) forage, build and protect the hive, clean it, and circulate air by beating their wings. If you see a bee flying outside of a hive it is a female worker beating her wings at 200 times per second. Drones are the guys. They have one purpose only. To mate with the queen who can live up to five years and lay up to 2,500 eggs a day.
If the queen dies, they can replace her by selecting a young larva and feeding it a special food called “royal jelly.”
The average worker bee lives for just five to six weeks. During this time, she’ll produce around a twelfth of a teaspoon of honey. Yet, all told, they collectively produce 2-3 times more honey than they need for food, so that’s good for us!
Bees boogie. To share information about prime locations, they do the “waggle dance,” performing a figure-eight and waggling their body to indicate the direction of the great food source.
Bees are cool. Let’s all support our bees. Not every bee is a honeybee, but every bee is a pollinator and without pollinators, well, the door to nature and all its wonders closes. Do your part. Put away the pesticides, cut back on lawn mowing, help make your gardens and yard safe for bees by creating bee hotels. Find out how: https://friendsoftheearth.uk/bees/make-a-bee-house.