Our honey
Rich in antioxidants, our raw honey is the truest expression of the land at Salmon Kill Farm. Our bees forage on plants like dandelions, wild clover, goldenrod, and lilacs, as well as wild and garden-grown berries and fruit trees in our orchard. Every batch displays a particular color and flavor based on the season and the pollinated plants available to the bees prior to each honey harvest.
Real, raw
Our honey is not pasteurized, ensuring that it retains all of the bee pollen for health-boosting benefits. Did you know that bee pollen contains vitamins, amino acids, essential fatty acids, micronutrients and antioxidants?
And because Salmon Kill Farm is certified organic, and isolated from farms that use pesticides and chemicals, our honey is free of neonicotinoids–insecticides that pose health risks to both bee populations and humans.
Peter Sadlon
Our bees are thriving under the care of Peter Sadlon, our resident property manager and gifted beekeeper. Read more below about Peter’s practices and how he came to beekeeping. And stay tuned–in his spare time, Peter is also making maple syrup.
While it wasn’t an intentional path, Peter has been working with bees locally for over 15 years. It came somewhat naturally–his grandfather was a beekeeper in Slovakia. Peter recalls childhood visits to where his grandfather kept a small structure housing his equipment, surrounded by wildflower-filled meadows and woods beyond the meadows–not quite unlike Salmon Kill Farm where we cultivate more meadows than hayfields.
Peter will tell you that beekeeping involves a good deal of trial and error, along with care for the bees’ health and well-being. He has a great deal of respect for European beekeeping practices and has sourced parts from Europe to replicate the way they build their hives, as well as organic treatments used to support our bees. An engineer by trade, he also replicated boxes he learned about in American Bee Journal for capturing local swarms that survive the winter in tree cavities and barn roofs–a sustainable and economical way to grow our bee population.
Our bees travel from flower to plant, collecting nectar and pollen that they take back to their hive and use as a food source. The majority of our honey is harvested in the spring. While the honey flow is greatest in July and August, during the fall harvest Peter leaves part of the honey behind as a food source for the bees over winter, as opposed to supplementing the hives with outside food sources. In this way, our practice of beekeeping uses little intervention…allowing the bees to do what they do best, naturally.
There will surely be implications if bee populations continue to decline, but no one can say with certainty what will occur, and when. We know what we’ve witnessed here at Salmon Kill Farm–that bees are an integral part of our incredibly diverse ecosystem. They help us by pollinating our plants and fruit trees, from which we harvest fruit to create our seasonal jams and chutneys. And they provide us with honey, a rich natural resource with powerful health benefits.