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Our Honey is Better and We Have the Data to Prove It!

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Irish Acres is very proud of its treatment-free approach to beekeeping and our efforts to create a “bees’ paradise” at the apiary that is rich in flowers and flowering trees and other plans that bees love. We want our honey to be full of pollen, our hives to be free of chemicals, and our bees to be as happy and healthy as they can be, living their lives as free of beekeeper interference as possible With this in mind, we set out to prove that our honey is, indeed, different than the run-of-the mill honeys you can buy in supermarkets and farmers’ markets around Kentucky and Tennessee. According to an article in Vice (NOTE: all sources cited in this blog post are referenced at the end), “Honey can deceive in many ways. Some honeys are heated to high temperatures, for easier manipulation and to avoid crystallization, but are presented as raw. Others are diluted with different kinds of sugar or syrups, made from rice, beet, corn, or other plans. Honey can be extracted while it’s still immat
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        It’s been almost four months since our last blog post. As I write this journal entry, I am sitting beside a beautiful lake at the campus of the American University of Iraq - Baghdad, where I have been working for the past year. Between my work in Iraq and the restrictions imposed on everyone around the world by COVID-19, I was not able to visit Irish Acres Apiary for a full year - twelve full months without a single hive inspection, without opening the hives, without any treatments or feeding, nothing. For one full year, our colonies of bees were on their own, left to their devices, without any “beekeeping” help from humans. How did they do?           Well, as it turns out, they did pretty well!            When I left Kentucky for Iraq in early October, 2019, I left behind eight hives, a number that was down from the previous year as I had been in Iraqi Kurdistan for the previous year and was unable to visit the apiary regularly, catch swarms, split hives, and do all the work t
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Keeping Your Sanity in Insane Times

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Throughout history, crazy times have come and gone as politics - and almost always, only politics - have made it impossible for many otherwise normal people to live in society. There have been many such periods in human history, from barbarian invasions, to religious persecutions, to the Dark Ages, to the Inquisition, to the Holocaust, and even into our own time with the politics that is consuming American life today. It was not so long ago that liberals and conservatives were found in both the Democratic and Republican parties, pushing both parties toward the middle and making it easy for politicians to work across the aisle and build bipartisan solutions to political problems. Sadly, those days seem to be long gone with the polarization of politics under which we now live, a polarization that splits families, “unfriends” long relationships on Facebook and in real life, and has even reached the point that many people will not even date unless their potential partner passes a litmus te
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Keeping Bees on Every Farm the Easy Way

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Published in Farming Magazine, Spring 2019,Vol.19, Issue 1,No. 73 I live in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, but my farm is in southcentral Kentucky. I am also a beekeeper, but my bees are almost 6400 miles away. Yet I keep bees, I keep them responsibly, and I do not really have to worry about over-wintering, frequent inspections, and all the other beekeeping “duties” that make conventional beekeeping such an onerous and expensive task. In fact, my guidebook for beekeeping was written in the 19th century by a French beekeeper, Georges de Layens, who developed a hive known today as the “Layens Hive.” De Layens describes how he set up beeyards that only had to be visited twice a year, spring and fall, to inspect them and harvest honey, both of which only took a few minutes. As a small-scale, organic farmer whose entire 15-acre farm is dedicated to bees, and whose apiary consists at present of about a dozen hives, I have come to appreciate the powerful role that bees play not only in na
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