New Thing: Visting a Bee Farm!

I’ve always loved bees – bumble bees, honey bees, any other type of bee, BUT NOT WASPS. Bees are great. I once rescued one from being stepped on. I love bees.

And I also love honey. Coincidentally, there are a few honey/bee farms near Calgary so I finally went to check one out!

Dalton & I visited the Chinook Honey Company, mainly because they offer an informational program about bees on the weekends and I was SO excited about the idea.

We arrived quite early and had a bit of time to kill, but it turns out there are FREE mead tastings! So we tried a bunch of different meads – you can even try them all if you want, you aren’t limited in selection. I am not sure if I’ve ever had mead before, but we ended up buying three bottles afterwords.

So it turns out I knew nothing about bees! But now I do. The program was $10, about an hour long, and GREAT. I 100% recommend it to anyone in the area that wants to learn about honey bees. There were a lot of props, including an example hive box, an actual honey bee colony you could watch between transparent walls, and a neat little video mainly featuring the owner of the company. I must be oblivious because it turns out the guy giving us our mead tasting was actually the owner. So that was neat!

The shop itself is also really cool – lots of bee products other than honey. Like bee pollen! I honestly had never heard of anyone consuming or using bee pollen for much, but yeah I guess you can eat it. There were also these things I bought because they looked interesting, called a “tub truffle” – essentially a bath bomb of some sort. But I think these ones were coated in honey. I did try one in the bath already and it was very pleasant. The smell makes me want desserts, and it effervesces for an absurdly long time considering how tiny they are (like truffle chocolates).

I would love to go back in August when they have their live viewing for tending to a hive, I’ll just have to find out when it is. Overall I had a great time and ended up spending a fair bit of money on various bee products.