When Colleen Grapes, pastry chef at The Harrison, said she was going to harvest honey at a bee farm, I begged her to take me. I traveled with her and 3 other chefs to the Red Bee Farm in Connecticut and spent the day shooting pictures and tasting some very special honey.
It seems that honey bees don’t sting unless you really bother them.
Bees make the honey & then they eat it. They also have to make enough to last all winter.
These brightly painted boxes are beehives. You start with large wooden box and buy a bee colony online. A colony comes with about 16,000 worker bees and a queen. When the box gets too crowded, you buy a smaller box and place it on top of the big one. Then you just keep adding boxes as needed. Now here’s the cool part. If you take one of the hives and place it in the middle of a field, lets say a field with blueberries, you’ll have honey that has the flavor of blueberries.
A blackboard with all the flavored honeys available.
Chefs Kate McAllister, Justin Emsberger, Robert Crossen & Colleen Grapes
A couple of bottles of wine and honey pairing with cheeses finished off the day. It was a really interesting trip. I never realized the potential of honey pairing. I’m going to try to get the bee keeper/owner Carla Marina Marchese to contribute some information to this website.
For now though you can check out www.redbee.com
