Nuanced. - Taste of Abby: Discover the Astonishing Impact of Bees

Episode Date: September 23, 2023

Dive into the buzzing world of beekeeping with Judy and Mike Campbell as they share their transformation from federal public servant and educator to passionate bee guardians, explore the environmental significance of bees,  unveil the diverse range of hive-derived products like honey, candles, and mead that you can find at Campbell's Gold Honey Farm & Meadery.Welcome to the Taste of Abby podcast mini-series! In this series, we'll explore Canada's largest farming community, connecting with farmers, creators, and restaurant owners. We'll dive into how they harvest from the land, strive towards sustainability, and strengthen our region. Join Aaron Pete as we deepen our connection to these lands and explore the tastes of Abby.Learn more: https://campbellsgold.com/Send us a textThe "What's Going On?" PodcastThink casual, relatable discussions like you'd overhear in a barbershop....Listen on: Apple Podcasts   SpotifySupport the shownuancedmedia.ca

Welcome to Taste of Abbey. I'm Aaron Pete from Chihuahawthal First Nation, and I host the Bigger Than Me podcast. In this series, we'll explore Canada's largest farming community, connect you with local farmers, creators, and restaurant owners. We'll dive into how they harvest from the land, strive toward sustainability, and strengthen the social fabric of our region. Join me as we deepen our connection to these lands and explore the Taste of Abbey. Judy, would you mind introducing yourself for people who might not be acquainted? Happy to. I'm Judy Campbell. I'm the production manager, Campbell's Gold, Honey Farm, and Metery. Brilliant. And Mike? And I'm the general manager. I'm Mike Campbell. And we've been here 37 years or 38 years, doing this for most of it. Let's start at the beginning. What were your careers before this?

Well, I worked for the Federal Public Service in about 23 different positions. Eventually worked myself up to an executive level, and I retired from an executive level at the federal government. Yeah. And I was a school teacher in Abbotsford for 36 years and before that in Langley. Incredible. How did you get started on this? Which one of you was excited about this? How did this get started? We used to go to a local church, and a lady had bought bees because she had severe arthritis, and she wanted to use bees for beasting therapy.

And it was a really dumb idea. Her husband was terrified of the bees. They set it up in a bog in the backyard, and the hive promptly fell over. The neighbors were complaining. And she asked me if I would take it off her hands. And so I said, I'll talk to Judy, but I would love to. And Judy said, no way. But Michael had red curly hair and he had these beautiful blue eyes and his youth and he was like cutie, right?

And he said, oh, but it's the Christian thing to do. So I let him bring the hive home and he moved it to the back of the property. No, she made me put it at the house. the very back of the property. And it died. And it was actually dead before we got it. We didn't know that. There were still bees alive in it,

but it had longed seeks to function as a hive. What made you interested in this? What made you open to the idea of moving forward to this? The hive is dead. Maybe this opportunity disappears. What made you want to pursue it further? Well, I had always been interested in bees. when I went to school in Langley in the early 60s there were we had an orchard on the school

property that we used to learn how to prune trees with and there were always four hives there right beside the school main path where kids walked by multiple times a day and so I was interested and I had been playing with making me since 1967. So I thought this is a perfect solution to making more mead. So I'll get some honey and any of the excess will make into mead. What did you see interesting about them? Some people, their initial reaction is fear when they see the bees flying around, they want to avoid it. What made you interested? I was just curious. You actually, if you take time to watch what the bees are doing,

you can learn a lot about the environment. They behave in interesting ways, and the more you study them, the more interesting they are. Seems like that's a good lesson for life. Judy, it seems like you had a pretty clear position on this. The answer is no. I was very clear. I was afraid of bees,

and I didn't want them anywhere near me. Put them at the back of the property. Don't come near me. But he converted me. How so? What made you interested? You're here now. It's been many years.

That's a fair question. So Mike, as Mike is, always wants to learn why things don't work. So he went and found a night school course, a beginner beekeeping, after this hive died. And he said, would you like to come with me? I'm going to take this night school course. And I said, will there be bees? And he said, no, I don't think so. I said, good.

I can come. And it was interesting. And on the last night of the class, they don't do this anymore, but on the last night of the class they actually had bees, they pulled them out of the fridge and they made them sting us. And the goal, of course, was to see if we were allergic. Well, darn it hurt, but I realized a couple days later that I hadn't died and it really wasn't that bad. And I thought, you know, I could probably, I could probably get along.

So over the years, I had less and less fear, did all the honey extraction. And over time, I just accepted that bees weren't going to harm me. And then when you pass that point, it's like, wow, these things are interesting. They're fuzzy. They can crawl all over you. They won't hurt you. If we get stung, it's our fault. And I love them now.

You chose to support your partner's endeavor. I think that that's so valuable. What made you take that initial step and decide to attend that beekeeping court? Well, you know, Michael's a pretty smart guy. And I did respect him, you know, long before I married him. And I thought, well, you know, maybe I should open my mind a little bit because I'm maybe I'm a little bit more narrow than he is. But that's in relationships. It's a give and take, right? And if somebody has a passion

for something, then it's not the other partner's role to discourage them. We should be encouraging them. You know, in the hive, it's all interrelated behavior. It's a social system and the organism all to itself. And really a good partnership or a good family setting mimics a hive, in my opinion. On top of that, you were also willing to get bit, and it seems like sometimes people have a fear of facing the things that they don't like, they don't want to go down that path. What made you take the chance and let yourself get stung? Well, you know, I made a lot of mistakes, and really they sting you if you make a mistake.

If you put your finger on them, they take that as an aggressive act. But if you understand that honeybees do not want to sting you because they'll die, then you start to get into the way they think and the way they behave and you become much more observant about what your behavior does and how they react. And, you know, it's a slow process, and if you're open to it, it's an incredible experience. It's an incredible journey. Mike, what were some of the major takeaways for you when attending this course? Is this where the fuel started and you got really excited about this?

What did you take away? Well, first of all, we figured out what was wrong. And then secondly, the people we met there, the course was run by Paul Van Westendorke, the provincial apiarist, and he was just new in the job, and the Fraser Valley Bee inspector was his assistant teacher. They were really tremendous people. And we really enjoyed what they had to say. And we met a number of folks that became beekeeping colleagues with us.

And they were tremendously interesting. And we got put in touch with, I guess, the Hansons who had run the P&E honey display for years in years in the 50s and 60s, and with the Axons, who Arnie was a chemical engineer, but it was also a fantastic queen breeder. And so there was just a lot of science, a lot of interest. And the first few years, the next door neighbor were growing raspberries. So we had tremendous honey crops here with very few bees.

And we were giving honey away to all of our friends and relatives until they were full. Mike actually met a fellow in the course that he partnered with later on to do pollination with 400 hives. So they used to do pollination of blueberries, raspberries, and cranberries. And that, so that class was pivotal in terms of the direction we went in eventually. Interesting. So what were those next big steps? You're obviously in a huge facility here. What were some of those next big steps to get started?

There was no big, no big facility then. We used to take, Mike was so successful with honeybees that every year he could split and double his colonies, right? So four became eight, eight became 16, 16 became 32 or more. And it was a different time. But we used to bring honey into the basement to extract. Actually, I used to bring it into the basement. We had the extractor down in the furnace room. And I used to have to walk down a flight of stairs to the basement door with a box.

And the boxes that I was carrying were about 80, 85 pounds. I have to balance it on my hip while I open. the door, walk through that door, open another door, walk a little bit further and open another door and into the furnace room. And that worked out fine, even though it was a bit of a hassle, until one day the room started filling up with bees. And Judy was quite cross with me. She said, you're bringing me boxes full of bees. And I said, no, there's no bees in these boxes. I've been really careful to make sure that they're empty.

I think what really happened was I used to, because I worked during the day, it was late at night when I used to do the extraction. And, of course, honeybees don't fly at night. So this one day, I was doing extraction on a Saturday or a Sunday. I can't remember. And the bees could smell the honey. And they found it opening in the outside of the building. In the chimney. They came down the chimney through the furnace.

They just kept coming in. And honestly God, I thought, oh, there's a few bees in here. And then there's more bees. And I thought, it was just like a swarm. It was like I was inside a swarm. But luckily it had no windows. So I just, I basically backed out of the room, turned off the light. And I said, I'm not going back in there. And when Michael came home, the air was blue because I was really terrified. You know, I was still in the process of becoming friendly with bees. So he came home and there's not much you can do. He had to vacuum them all out because they couldn't find their way out again. And then I learned not to extract during the day, but that was the beginnings of deciding we had to have alternative

extraction facilities, which with some other things that were happening, led us to believe that we could build this building. And also the front room was becoming full of shelves of of honey because people were coming to the door to buy it and it was gradually so that we couldn't actually do anything in the front room except to sell honey. So you're dipping your toe in this. What makes you go, let's go all the way, let's follow through, let's push this forward? Well, sadly, it's not a, it's not a happy story that pushed us over. We've been talking about, I said in my moment, we've got to scale this down to a hobby or build it up to a business. So that was a germinating point. But it really wasn't until after we had the loss of

the sun that we said, you know, what will we be doing in the future? You change, your life changes and you look at the world differently. And we were both thinking about retirement then. And we thought, well, what will we do? So, yeah, it just is a whole series of things colliding together and we came up with the idea, well, hey, let's scale this up to a business and how would we do that? And it was long days of planning. But eventually we said, as Mike was retiring, we would build this structure. Or actually, we had an old barn on the present site. Yeah, we knocked it down. And we thought it should be fairly easy just to make a few little renovations and use that barn. Well, it turned out that was a really stupid idea. And we hired an engineer and he came

and he, oh, yeah, we could do this, but we'll need to put posts here and there and a new wall here for support and it would have turned into little rats maze. And it was really good that we decided actually to knock it down and build a game. because when the fellow came to knock it down, most of the building just turned into sawdust. It was all full of dry rot, so it wouldn't have lasted much longer anyway. It's really a nice picture we've got of the old barn going down and the beginnings of the new barn.

It's like rising from the ashes. It's a transformation that happened in our life and in our business. And so that has always been, it's been fun for us to do it. and it gave us something to occupy our minds and move us forward. It seems like there's benefits to you personally, but there's benefits to the community, there's benefits to the bees, there's benefits to the plants, there's so many benefits. It's almost like a social service that you're providing by doing this. Can you talk about the impact this has on the community?

I'd really like to talk about that because one of the goals we said at the beginning, we didn't care if we made any money. We just had to have a facility for the extraction and for the equipment and to put the honey. And then we said one of the goals was to build community because we had worked away from the farm and we sensed that we were just distant from our neighbors. So if we could build community, that would be great. So we decided how would we do that?

And Mike has been a teacher for all those years and he really struggled with the idea of retiring, but he learned that we could teach beekeeping, right? So education became a focal point. And that's really how we began, I think, to build community as we educate. And we explain and we offer local products and we... And the other thing was the farm when we bought it was totally unproductive of anything.

And we wanted to show that a small acreage could actually be transformed into something that was environmentally friendly and also productive. And sustainable. This is marginal farmland, and we've been very fortunate to convert it into something that's way more than marginal. You know, it's never going to be lush farmland, but we can grow most of the fruit and the berries and the grapes, all of the grapes, on the property that we put into our wine. We've got tons of varieties of flowers, trying to provide some diversity for the bees. And so one of the things we do is we offer free garden walks three times a year.

So Jenny will take people around and show them what they can plant that's bee friendly. Doesn't cost them anything. And she can talk about some of the skills and what to look for so they can enhance their garden. So there are lots of things that we do to, but the focus is always on education. We think that's hugely important. The important of the bee as being the sentinel of the environment, that really is a message we'd like to get out to people. On that note, bees play such a role and a lot of people don't understand what they do and the impact they can have on ecosystems and environments. Can you talk about some of the fun facts you two have learned about bees, what they do behind the scenes?

I know I spoke with Paul and he talks about how bumblebees are more local. They can't travel as far, but honeybees, they can dance in the hive, they can communicate with each other and go longer distances. Can you tell us about some of the facts that have stood out to you over the years? Well, first of all, we found that when we first did pollination, the farmers wanted us there because, for example, you don't get a decent blueberry without proper pollination. You don't get a decent cranberry without proper pollination. And that's important. And we also found out that, say, bumblebees like you're wearing on your shirt, actually work together with honeybees to make pollination more effective.

So there are also a number of solitary bees, the mason bee being one, that are important pollinators. And they're not competing against each other. they help each other in their collection of pollen and honey. So that's really kind of cool, is the more you can support that environment, the better it is. We were challenged, I think, as we were doing pollination, to really grasp that those were monocrops. And monocrops are wonderful for 30 days out of every year.

But for 11 months of the year, they are a food desert for pollinators. And when we talk about pollinators, it's not just honeybees. It's hundreds of varieties of wild pollinators and wild bees. Way more pollinators, but honeybees are the way that we can teach people about that. So we like to talk about diversity and sustainability. And how, you know, if you just go to the fast burger place and get a bun for 30 days and a meat for 30 days and the lettuce for 30 days, that's kind of the diet that we've got honeybees on.

And really what they need, just like we, need a balanced diet and good nutrition. And so to make sure that we are providing for the health of our bees, which ultimately then will sustain the agricultural world and our food supply, we need to learn what they need. That's number one. And our daughter is actually doing massive research on this and planting to ensure that we have something blooming virtually every. month of the year to keep the bees productive and healthy.

Sorry, when I spoke with Paul Van Westendorpe, he talked about how one of the things that farmers don't often realize is that if they leave a few plants there, they can kind of prevent this, and that's one of the key steps. You've also kind of alluded to there are things we as people can learn from the honeybees, from bees in general, and coming from an indigenous culture, this is commonplace to try and learn from the land and understand it deeper. Can you talk about what we as people can learn from bees? Well, they have such a wonderful social structure.

And the interdependence of every bee, every bee has a job, and if something goes wrong, other bees will kick in and do the job. The queen lays eggs. If something happens to the queen, that whole hive is in jeopardy because there's no new babies that are going to be no new eggs to make new babies, to make new workers. Understanding the roles, you know, in terms of the nurse bee, the worker bee, who become the foragers, they're all worker bees,

but the foragers that go out of the hive and how hard they work, and they work themselves to death. The drones have a very important role, but they don't do anything in the hive. Just even understanding the different roles the bees play. And that's kind of fun, too, when we do tours, and we can find drones, we can pick them up, and we can hand them around pit.

The kids can pet, and they don't have stingers. So they're kind of fuzzy, they're kind of cuddly, and for kids, it's kind of a fun experience, and for us it is too. So that social system is huge, because I think we have so much to learn from how the bees cooperatively work and how they sustain and how they look after each other and how, you know, if a little honeybee gets honey all over them, the rest of them will all come to rescue because it's all sticky now and it can't get, you know, move properly. Well, they'll all be on that be helping it, right? And if they are, if there's mites or disease, they're all cleaning the hive. Every, every cell is cleaned out and sanitized before it's reused for food or for a baby. Like there's just a whole hygienic way of behaving

the hive, a social system that supports each other. And as human beings, I think we have a lot to learn from them. It feels like we're always taking from the land. It feels like we're always extracting something. You have such a plentiful place here. You have so many different varieties of food, of candles. You utilize so much of it. I'm wondering if you can talk about some of the products you have here. Yeah, we don't waste anything from the hive. We basically, when we harvest the honey, we extract the honey from frames that have cappings. So we have to scrape the cappings to make it flow out. Even those little teeny cappings are melted down and rendered so that we get clean beeswax. And we melt them by using the sun.

Solar. We don't use anything that's high energy. So we have a little screen, a little box, and the sun melts the crap out of the beeswax. Because there's a propolis and all kinds of bits in there. And you get a nice piece. So beeswax goes into candles. It goes into soaps. It goes into saves. Honey, of course, is just honey. But different nectar sources provide you with different colors and different textures and different tastes of honey. Some can be quite sweet. Some cannot be sweet at all. It's extraordinary. And then Mike, 50-some-odd years ago, decided to try his first batch of meed, and he wooed me with his meat. Yeah, I loved it. So as we were planning our business lines for the business, we said, well, we need to have meat in there.

But it mushroomed into all kinds of melamels and pymints, and those are all sort of ancient terms for various honey wines. And the interesting thing about the mead production is, Most people have an idea about me being something that's sickly sweet. And they had no ideas about melamels, which are honey and fruit. They had no ideas about methaglins, which are honey and spice. So that became an education experience in itself. And honey wine can be extremely dry. The yeast eats all that honey up and makes it.

into alcohol, it could be quite dry. And quite alcoholic. Yeah, it's good. Yeah, so in addition, the bees actually collect pitches and tars from trees and flowers, and they make that into the beehive antiseptic called propolis. And we basically, we don't make the propolis ointments and saves. We buy them from other beekeepers to make them because we just don't have the time. But propolis is an extraordinary product, and there's lots of research around it.

But there's a whole field of apotherapy, which uses honey, royal jelly, and propolis, and pollen. And it just basically is a different way of curing the body. And bee venom itself is being shown to be helpful for some people with arthritis or even MS and ALS. To help with the symptoms, not the disease. Yeah. And Lyme disease. Yeah. There's so many different products.

It's broad. all types of things. What are your two favorite products? What are the things you're taking home to use? Oh, we take everything in. She drinks or eats a kilo of honey a week. Well, between my daughter and I, we go through a kilo of honey, but we don't eat it all at once. I mean, it's gradual, right? It's antimicrobial. Why would you not want it in your body? So my favorite products are, I'll eat any sweet honey. I like a lighter honey. Fireweed is my absolute favorite. It's the champagne of all honey. And then, of course, mead.

Of course, because I now do most of the winemaking, Jenny and Mike help. I get to taste all the wines. So, you know, I'm never without. Mike, what's your favorite product? I think the number one favorite product has to be fireweed honey. And I have been relying on the antibiotic creams. I get lots of cuts and scrapes. You can see them all over my hands.

And they actually make me heal up so much faster than anything else. The proper screens. Yeah. We used to have horses, and the horses got out into the bush next door when I was teaching. And they were doing the horse laughing with me. They would run ahead of me just in the dark, just far enough so I couldn't catch up to them. and they'd turn around and look at me and ha ha ha and i was chasing after them and i tripped and i fell and i got a dirty old stick poked into my cheek and i got a really nasty infection

and i spent multiple trips going to the doctor getting antibiotics i was on antibiotics for a long time And I had to go down to my friend Arnie and buy a queen. And his wife was a nurse at the Royal Columbian. And she looked at me, and she said, you look awful. So she said, you need some of this stuff. So she gave me a jug of propolis cream. And I put some on. That was on a Friday or a Saturday, and I had to go back to the doctor on Tuesday.

but by Tuesday I was all healed up and cured and the swelling was going down so I just told him that I was what I was using and he said that the antibiotics probably had kicked in but since that time I've used the same stuff over and over again and really marvelous stuff and in the wintertime when you're getting cold

holds, take a few drops of propless tincture and a drop a spoonful of water and swirl it around in your mouth. And it does marvelous job of fixing sore throats. So as an old person, I kind of like things that fix things faster. Naturally. It seems like there's things to learn here, a way to connect with community, learn about ecosystems, products that will help you with your health and live a more natural life. What do you hope people take away when they visit?

Well, we do see, we have a guest book. They do take away the fact that they've had a pleasant experience. They've learned something. And they've got some products that they value. And I know that many of them will come back again. And we engage them in discussions about sustainability. Just we make friends. Our customers are our friends.

And they often will bring people when they're visiting from other countries. We've had people from Austria, Switzerland, Holland, all over the states. This is a place. The Saudi Arabia folks. Thailand. So we have kind of a global community because honey is an international product. And good honey is highly valued. And Canada produces, although it's just 1.1% of the world honey supply, is a very good honey.

And the other thing is we really enjoy just the world honey I really enjoy just taking the time to, I'm a social person, taking the time to chat with people, all sorts of people come through here. We had a very dear customer, Peter, who was in his 90s, and he used to come and probably spend an hour chatting about his life experiences each time he came. we really benefited from the knowledge that he was sharing with us and it was not going to do us any particular good, but it was just such a neat thing to have this nice person come and share information with us and who felt comfortable doing it. We actually take advice from our customers. One customer tasted the lemon honey and the ginger honey and said, have you ever thought

of putting those two together. And that suggestion came from a customer, which we did, and it was more popular than either of the individual honeies. So there are some experiences like that, and we take what they have to say. If they have some criticism, we really pay attention to it. How can people connect with you? How can they follow this journey,

and how can they start to buy your products? Well, we're online at www. Campbellscold.com. and we open up our farm for tours. We actually have Open Hive Thursdays during July and August. We invite people to come by. We love to talk to them. So online they can connect with us.

They can drop in at the farm four days a week. We'd love to connect with anybody that wants to learn about bees or learn about the products. And we'll answer questions. We often get questions about swarms. And it turns out most of the ones we get are calls about wasps. So we go through a process of getting pictures and we help them diagnose what the problem is. So there's all, I mean, we just touch everything, artists looking for beeswax.

If you've got to. Carpenters looking for wax for their sauce. Yeah. So we've had some extraordinary questions and it pushes us to learn more. But yeah, we'll do, we'll help people in any way we can with beehive understanding or products. Well, I really appreciate both of you sharing your story. I think it's so beautiful the way you two work together. the way you've chased to this passion and ultimately brought it to fruition that works with community

and supports them where everybody's able to learn. I think there's so many benefits likely across the area and people learn so much more. So I appreciate you both sharing your time today. Thank you. Thank you.