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I am so excited about a new product we have available in our shop – Chipotle Honey Hot Sauce. We’ve been working on this sauce since the summer, perfecting the taste, colour, list of ingredients, and now we are ready, hot sauce in hand. What I love about it is it combines so many favourite things – garlic, honey, chipotle chilis and it has both a sweet and spicy flavour and while I do love sauces that blow your head off, this isn’t one of them. It has a heat but the honey softens the blow.Â
My eldest daughter, Carlyle is the keeper of our bees. She started her first hive when she was 19 and now has grown to several hives over the years. Carlyle has no fear of being stung or any other angry bee behaviour and happily climbs ladders or roof tops to find a runaway swarm of bees helping deliver them back to a home. She is respectful of them, maintains a nourishing habitat and they of her. And at the end of the season, reward with kilos of golden delicious honey.Â
We both love experimenting with different honey flavours, one year we had a lot of buckwheat in our fields and the honey took on a deep golden colour and flavour too. There are many flowers here in the gardens, lots of lavender, herbs and I know these things all contribute to our honey’s unique flavour. When Carlyle first started her bee collection it seemed every honey bee we found in the gardens had a name and was her own special friend. I think we all feel protective about bees and butterflies and we do what we can to make sure their path is cleared on the property for optimal nourishment.
More and more crops such as vegetables, flowers, nuts depend on pollinators and bees play an important role in this cycle of growth and agriculture production. Bees travel a huge distance to look for pollen. We are lucky in that we have some land and a variety of both wild and cultivated plants which bees help keep alive and well. Every year, we add more native species to our garden mix both for beauty and to help our bees stay alive and well. Sometimes, it is disappointing to find that a harsh winter has decimated a hive or disease or predators like bears. We’ve experienced all of these losses and they hurt. Bees are so vulnerable to the environment and the pollution we contribute.Â
This summer promises to be a good one. We’ve heard the buzzing from the hives so they have survived another winter. We are looking forward to a beautiful harvest. In the meantime, we have hot sauce. I invite you to give it a try!
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