Our bees buzzed double-time during the lockdown Partial view of our state-of-the-art processing plant. After a hiatus of more than a year, Rancho Santa Clara's honey production is back in business, with a bumper harvest of dark amber honey that is also light and particularly sweet. The pause in production was caused by our manager …
I could tell something was terribly wrong when I saw Stew's and Felix' long faces, behind the protective hoods they wear when handling our beehives, as they returned from collecting the honey panels from the beehives."A real disaster," said Stew, in his usual understated manner. "We barely got half a bucketful of honey."Except this time …
All outward signs pointed toward a bumper harvest of honey—good rains; nice cover of flowers, both wild and planted; mild temperatures—but for some reason we got only a fraction of the usual production this year.The number of monarch butterflies and their more exotic cousins also seemed to be sharply down. The only bumper crop this …
Just in time for Halloween, and the Mexican celebration of the Day of the Dead, spiderwebs have appeared all over the ranch. Some are small, maybe six inches across, others can span gracefully and grandly for three or four feet, sometimes from one bush or tree to another. A few are works in progress, just …
A month ago Stew, Félix, our dog Gladys and I set off for Morelia to pick up a third beehive, a seven-hour expedition that included lunch at Kentucky Fried Chicken. Félix was fascinated by the lakes, birds and other sights along the way and delighted with the chicken which he had seen advertised on TV. …
For all his laudable personal qualities—honesty, first-rate smarts and a willingness to work, among others—our gardener Félix' prospects in life are dampened by the fatalism that pervades most Mexicans in the campo or countryside. Life is but a torturous trek and you just pray something really awful doesn't happen along the way.It's not a worldview that …
The much anticipated day to collect the honey from Stew's beehive finally arrived last Friday, and a ho-hum feeling buzzed through my spine. The project had been going on since February, with free bee stings for everyone including the dogs, which had learned to flee whenever they saw or sniffed any bee-related doings. Most of …
Yesterday, San Miguel's roving apiculture ambassadors, Bee Bob and his ten-pound mutt, Pepper, buzzed by the ranch for an emergency consultation. The actual emergency occurred about two weeks ago when Stew once again try to answer that perennial question, "What is going on with the bees?"Honey? Buzz off, we're not in the mood. He had donned …
Ready for occupancyUnless the vagaries of Mexican Time interfere, later this week we should be getting a three-pound package containing approximately 7,000 bees, ready to buzz under the direction of a queen bee. The latter is traveling from Veracruz in her own separate little jewel box-like container, while the rank-and-file bees are coming from a …
El Rancho Santa Clara 