Beekeeping

For the first time in Old Blue history, we will be selling honeybee colonies to the wider public this spring. If you’ve been considering getting one or more hives, now is the time to preorder your bees. Here’s our schedule and offerings: (April 1) 5-Frame Nuc with Anarchy Apiaries Queen or Overwintered Old Blue Queen […]

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We have a rad new mural on the honey house at Old Blue Raw Honey painted by artist Manny Arechiga, and we could not be more pleased with how it turned out. Manny is a friend who has been helping us out with beekeeping and honey extraction since early June, but last week he used a different set […]

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Update: Thanks for all your support! The sale was a huge success and has come to an end. Stay tuned for more updates about our new honey house. Old Blue Raw Honey is a small beekeeping enterprise and varietal honey company owned and operated by my beekeeper husband Henry and me. Henry manages about 500 honey-producing […]

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I’m pleased and excited to announce an upcoming collaboration with Cocotte Restaurant, Seastar Bakery, Nectar Creek Mead, and Old Blue Raw Honey in the form of a honey-centric brunch on Sunday, April 19 in Portland, OR at Cocotte. Here’s the menu: 1st course Sweets: Honey drinking porridge, baked goodness, honey-roasted seasonal fruit 2nd course Toast: Honey-baked beans on […]

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I have about a million photos to share from our recent trip to check on bees in the almond orchards of Northern California, but before I do that, I wanted to pop in quickly with a few shots from a recent honeybee colony removal that Henry did here locally. I’ve written about bee removals a […]

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We’ve had our honey up for sale online for six weeks now, and so far, everything has been going extraordinarily well. Our customers are emailing/Instagramming rave reviews, and I haven’t yet made any major mistakes in the packing and shipping process (Whew!). When I originally wrote the product descriptions for each varietal, I intentionally did not […]

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Finally finally, Old Blue Raw Honey is up for sale on our new website! I’m so excited and proud and anxious to share this news with y’all. Henry and his bees have been working like crazy all spring and summer to create the bounty that we now have stored away in buckets and bottles, ready […]

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Henry has contracted with growers to do a handful of local crop pollinations this year (blueberries for Radke’s Blueberries and Gibson Farms plus raspberries, blackberries, and strawberries for Sunset Valley Organics), but the one crop pollination that he’s been most excited about is clary sage. Clary sage is known for its medicinal properties and for its […]

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Henry and I extracted nearly 40 gallons of honey on Sunday. The early honey varietals that the bees produced are quite different from main season flows in many ways. First off, they taste different. As you can see in the photo above, early season honey contains a significant amount of pollen that we don’t filter out […]

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For the last four years, Henry has been adding to and selecting from his pool of honeybee genetics all originating from feral, Pacific Northwest-adapted colonies. In order to propagate those genetics as well as maintain and increase his hive numbers, he started grafting his own queens last year. Grafting queens takes a lot of time, […]

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