What It's Like to Visit a Bee Farm in Ontario

A working apiary since 1975 · Clovermead, Aylmer, Ontario

At a bee farm the bees are the business, and everything else grew around them. Here's what that actually looks like when you visit one.

What a bee farm actually is

An apiary is a place where honey bees are kept. That is the whole definition, and it covers everything from four hives behind a house to a commercial operation running hundreds. A bee farm you can visit sits somewhere in the middle: enough hives to make honey properly, and enough of a front end that the public can come and see how it works.

Clovermead runs about 24 million bees. Every jar of Summer Blossom on the shop shelf came from them.

The distinction that matters is whether the honey on the shelf came from the hives on the property. Plenty of places sell honey. Far fewer make their own.

How Clovermead started

In 1975, Chris Hiemstra's father Henry started selling honey out of the garage behind his house and called the operation Clovermead Apiaries. That is the whole origin. Honey, and a garage.

In 1987 Henry and Ann moved an 1852 log cabin onto the farm and restored it. That cabin is the Honey Shop you walk into today, which is why the building feels older than the business. It is older than the business, by about 120 years.

Everything else on the property grew outward from those hives. The play areas, the corn maze, the animal barn, the splash pad: all of it came later, built around a honey operation that was already there.

The glass hive

The centrepiece is Ontario's largest glass bee display hive. A live colony works behind glass, and you can stand there as long as you like watching them do it.

Watching thousands of insects run a coordinated operation with nobody directing it is the kind of thing that catches adults as much as kids.

One honest note on timing: the hive is stocked with bees roughly June through the end of September. Outside those months the display is there but the colony is not. If seeing live bees is the reason you are coming, come in summer.

Summer days with the beekeeper

In July and August, daily Monday to Saturday, a beekeeper runs a session where a hive is opened in front of you. You watch from a screened observation area, so there is nothing to be nervous about.

What happens in a session:

• A hive is opened up and worked through frame by frame
• You can try pumping the bellows on a bee smoker
• If you want to, you can touch a drone bee. Drones have no sting
• You can meet the queen, and if the timing is right, watch a baby bee hatch
• You can slide your hand into a warm beehive, enclosed in plexiglass, and feel how much heat a colony generates

A colony generates and holds its own heat, and feeling that with your hand lands differently than reading about it.

There is also a video presentation and a Discovery Station with displays if you want the background before or after.

Six varieties, and why they taste different

Honey tastes like whatever the bees were working. That is the single most useful thing to understand before walking into a honey shop, and it is why a tasting bar exists at all.

Clovermead has six floral sources on tap:

• Summer Blossom, floral with subtle fruity undertones. The house honey, and the base for most of the spreads
• Wild Blueberry, delicate and floral with berry undertones. The nectar comes from wild blueberry blossoms in Nova Scotia, which is why it tastes like nothing else on the wall
• Sweet Clover, pale and mild with subtle vanilla notes. The gentle one
• Buckwheat, dark, full-bodied and earthy
• Thistle, from thistle blossoms
• Golden Rod, a late-season honey from one of the last flows of the year

Because they are on tap, you can bring a container back and have it refilled rather than buying a new jar each time.

Why unpasteurized honey goes solid

Raw honey granulates. It turns grainy, then solid, and people assume it has gone off. It has not. Granulation is what unprocessed honey does, and it is one of the clearest signs you are holding the real thing rather than something heated and filtered until it stays clear forever.

If you want it liquid again, sit the jar in warm water. Do not microwave it.

What else comes out of a hive

Honey is the famous one, but a working apiary produces several things:

• Beeswax, rendered from the frames into blocks and candles
• Bee pollen, collected granule by granule as foragers come home loaded
• Propolis, the resin bees gather from tree buds to seal and protect the hive
• Royal jelly, what nurse bees feed a larva when they are raising a queen

At Clovermead, propolis and royal jelly are blended into honey so they are easy to take by the spoonful, and Power Honey combines royal jelly, bee pollen and propolis in one jar. All of it is in the Honey Shop year round.

Planning a visit to a bee farm near you

The Honey Shop is free to visit and open to everyone. A day ticket is only needed for the Adventure Farm, which is where the beekeeper sessions, the glass hive, the Animal Barn, the pumpkin patch and the other 65+ attractions are.

Clovermead is at 11302 Imperial Road in Aylmer, about 20 minutes from London, 15 from St. Thomas, 25 from Tillsonburg and 40 from Woodstock. Parking is free.