The worker honeybee is famous for her hard work, which is why she’s called the worker. If need be, she will travel up to five or six miles from the hive in search of clover, dandelion, apple, or other flowers, and she can visit up to 100 flowers in a single flight. She can carry 70 milligrams of nectar in her honey stomach, which is not the same stomach that digests her food. Her body weight is nearly 70 milligrams, and if you can imagine flying through the air while carrying a parcel weighing as much as yourself, then you know how hard she’s working. In an entire season of this fast-paced workday, one honey bee can gather up to 40 pounds of pollen and 265 pounds of nectar a year.
Pollinators in Willamette Valley
The Willamette Valley is one of the most diverse agricultural regions in the United States, and Marion County is a big part of that area. Ranging from Saint Paul to Jefferson and from Independence to the Cascade Mountain Range, everything from radish seed to clover, strawberries to peaches, watermelon to squash, and hazelnuts, cherries, and pears, the region is a shining agrarian star in the United States. Farmed agriculture, from flowers to vegetables to berries, requires pollination in order to become the product we see at the produce stand and in the grocery store. In fact, one of every three bites of food we eat can be attributed to pollinators. The hard-working honey bee is one of the most popular working pollinators on the planet.
Local beekeepers have formed a working partnership with farmers in the region to get the best pollination result possible. It can take up to ten trips before some honeybees fully pollinate a flower, but since a honeybee hive can contain up to 50,000 bees, this is not a problem. One of the most golden results of using honeybees to pollinate food, seeds and other crops, such as meadowfoam, is the honey itself.
Flying Bee Ranch in Salem
The most recent numbers from The Oregon Bee Project indicate there are over 80,000 commercially managed honeybee colonies in Oregon. Many of these hives are managed by beekeepers who transport the hives to flowering crops as a paid service to growers. Many local honeybee keepers began as hobbyists and expanded their interests to much-needed pollination services. Beekeeper Jeremy Mitchell, owner of Flying Bee Ranch in Salem, puts a public face over the commercial beekeeper’s veil.
In 2017, Mitchell brought his honey-tasting options out from the back room of his house, a honey sampling venture established by his Great Aunt in 1999, and gave it a storefront easily accessible from the road. The quaint tasting room still has an in-home feel with its polished floors and neatly arranged shelves touting honey dippers and jars, gifts, and books on beekeeping. But Salem’s only honey tasting room also provides one of the largest selections of varietal raw honey you are likely ever to run across. The tasting room maintains a selection of at least 20 samples to taste and purchase. Flying Bee Ranch offers flavors like meadowfoam, lavender, pumpkin, carrot blossom, white sage, fireweed, baby’s breath, orange, radish, and more. Every sample has its own distinctive taste.
“Honeys are like wine,” Mitchell explains. “The soil composition and the weather highly influence the honey taste.”
Along with the friendly and knowledgeable service provided by Jeremy Mitchell and co-owner Delsey Maus, Flying Bee Ranch also offers beekeeping supplies for hobbyists getting started in beekeeping or for the more experienced beekeepers, all presented neat and orderly in the tasting room. A visual representation of start to finish – minus the bees themselves, of course; those gals are outside carrying nectar or pollen to the hive.
Lining the shelves along another wall, light streaming in through the windows to highlight the golden purity of sweet delight, are container after container of bottled raw honey with names you may never have imagined. Pumpkin, carrot, orange, vetch, maple, coriander, and many more. Any one of which is offered for you to taste by Jeremy and Delsey who want you to be happy with your selection. When asked which honey is the best seller of all the kinds of honey offered, Jeremy said it was the wildflower because of its use as an allergy inhibitor, but far and above all the others, Meadowfoam is the runaway favorite.
Honey Tasting Room hours at Flying Bee Ranch are from Tuesday to Saturday, 9 a.m. until 5 p.m.
Flying Bee Ranch
5180 Lardon Road NE, Salem
503.399.8409
