Our beekeeping project
Our insect friends, the bees, arrived on our planet 60 million years before we did! Thanks to them, we have thousands of fruit and vegetable varieties, essential to our daily lives.
With their impressive energy and hard work, the bees deposit all sorts of products in their hives – pollen, wax, propolis, royal jelly and, of course, honey. Bees are particularly productive when their hives are situated on sites surrounded by a rich biodiversity of plant life, in particular flowers that favour the production of honey. At Spa Eastman, with its gardens and fruit trees, we have exactly the kind of environment that bees love!
A pure, natural food, our honey is very easy to digest and it has significant antibacterial properties.
L’Abeille d’or : Spa Eastman’s honey
As a result of a partnership between Rucher Boltonnois and our vice-president Gérard Marinovich, we installed two hives on the spa property in the spring of 2020. In mid-August, we harvested our first batch of honey.
I was fascinated by the harmony and organization that goes into making a hive function so smoothly. It’s a most perfect system, producing the most perfect product! Bees certainly give us humans a real lesson in humility.
– Gérard Marinovich
Spa Eastman’s Summer Honey
L’Abeille d’or, our unpasteurized and unfiltered, natural honey, emits aromas (among others) of raspberries, blackberries, clover and milkweed. The honey is delicious eaten on its own, on a slice of bread or as a sweetener in herbal tea. Abeille d’or has also a low glycemic index.
Spa Eastman’s Fall Honey
Harvested in August, our unfiltered fall honey is characterized by its amber colour and slightly spicy taste. The special characteristics of our second 2020 harvest come from the thousands of Goldenrod plants that surround the hive and that our hard-working bees have tirelessly foraged.
Fun Facts
- There are 800 species of bees in Canada (20,000 across the world) and they belong to the species Apis mellifera (Western Honey Bee). Considered to be semi-domesticated, this species is very industrious.
- Each of our hives harbours 50,000 bees and every day, a single insect buzzes back and forth for an average distance of 3 km, gathering nectar, pollen, propolis and water – an astonishing work ethic for such a tiny creature. It’s not for nothing we use the expression ‘busy bees’!
- These tireless workers labour non-stop and they die of exhaustion after only a few weeks (during the summer) or a few months (in winter).
- Each hive can produce over 100 lbs of honey annually.
We can pretty well say that our beloved bees are part of the Spa Eastman work team!
