Dan Gordon, a hobby beekeeper and his wife, Becky, were kind enough to have me over for dinner last week. Besides cooking the best squash dish I ever had, he gave me a jar of honey. This was no ordinary honey. He purchased it from the only commercial beekeeper in the small country of Samoa in the South Pacific. The beekeeper has one of the best jobs you can do from home, owning the Tropical Honey Company. The jar label reads
“This is pure natural tropical honey, with a unique flavor, is gathered from a variety of nectar sources found in the plantations and rainforests on the islands of Samoa”.
It is pretty good.
Now, imagine being the only beekeeper in a country. It would be a totally different way of managing bees than here in Northern CA. In Samoa, there are only about 450 hives, and most are owned by the beekeeper that produced my jar of honey. Here, there can be 450 colonies or more in a single yard, and multiple beekeepers may have that many colonies in a 5 mile radius. The differences are incredible.
