The Sweet Life at Honeyrun Farm
Ten million bees keep business humming for Jarne and Isaac Barnes
By Nancy Mckibben
Photography by Catherine Murray and Jessica Opremcak
Their story meanders sweetly, like a nectar-laden bee, from rural
Honeyrun Farm is the couple’s two acres of paradise tucked into the 2,000 owned by Isaac’s family outside Williamsport, Ohio. Their farmhouse overlooks a shaded lawn that slopes to a flower and vegetable garden. Here, you might see Mason and Maizy Barnes, ages 3 and 2, tumbling around the grass like puppies. Jayne trails behind, picking lavender to infuse the honey produced by their bees. (See sidebar to learn about honey infusions.)
Isaac tends the bees and builds things. The children play in the fenced playground, or wander beneath the rustic arbor, or nibble bread and honey in the honey house, all products of their father’s craftsmanship. The chickens enjoy Isaac’s handiwork in a coop that features arched windows salvaged from Isaac’s grandma’s house. The only naysayer is the family goat, who escapes like Houdini from every improvement that Isaac makes to his pen.
Although paradise has its price, Jayne and Isaac are happy to pay it: in planning, perseverance and unrelenting hard work.
The Flight of the Bumblebee
Jayne, from Millersburg in northeastern
“Jayne was raised in the country with a farm background,” says Isaac. “She’s also beautiful, intelligent, open-minded and interested in many things — especially travel — like I am.”
Jayne calls Isaac “an intelligent country boy. He had all the great qualities of a man who knows how to work with his hands, be creative and hardworking and appreciate the simple things, yet he was able to philosophize about life.”
Prompted by Isaac’s insatiable appetite for honey, Jayne bought Isaac his first hive in 2003, “only three months after we started dating.” They married in 2005 and, while Jayne studied, Isaac worked for a commercial beekeeper in
Plan Bee
“Part of the reason we’re here,” Jayne says as she disentangles Mason from the dog he is trying to ride, “is because the farm is a fun place for kids to grow up.” Both Jayne and Isaac are determined to arrange their lives so that she can stay at home with the children, and they can live on the farm, close to family.
Isaac and Jayne work hard for those goals. Besides teaching, Isaac spends his winters building the honeycomb frames — 3,000 and counting — and the molds and cutting tools that Jayne uses in her soap making.
Each of Isaac’s 17 bee yards, or apiaries, contains 10 to 12 hives of 60,000-80,000 bees each (the number varies by season), which may fly two or three miles a day in their quest for blossoms. So that the hives do not compete for nectar, Isaac sites his yards within a 20-mile radius of his farm, paying a honey rent to each property owner — typically two pounds of honey per hive per year. Of course, the bees also do their landlord the favor of pollinating his fruit and flowers.
Every spring Isaac performs the profitable but Herculean task of transporting and renting his bees to Sunny Hill and Lynd’s Fruit Farms to pollinate their apple orchards. After 8pm, when the bees are quiet in their hives (stackable wooden boxes or “supers” with pull-out frames that hold the honeycomb, not the dome-shaped skeps we generally picture), Isaac loads the hives onto truck and trailer, drives them to the orchards, unloads them and repeats the task in reverse 10 days later.
Bee Friendly
How can we live in a bee-friendly way? James Tew, an
Be tolerant of bees.
If you find some living in your yard, try to find a way to live with them.
Don’t spray more pesticides than necessary.
Plant flowering plants and trees, rather than just grass, so the bees have something to eat. Clover and dandelions, which have been nearly eradicated in city and suburb, were once the main summer diet of honeybees.
Provide a home for leafcutter bees, which pollinate but do not produce honey and rarely sting. Make a nest box by drilling about 50 2- to 3-inch-deep holes in a hardwood block and hang it up in a tree or garden shed at the back of your property. Tew promises that the block will not attract termites or wasps.
Consider keeping bees.
“Three-fifths of the people at beekeeping meetings now are brand new,” Tew says. He attributes this growth in beekeeping to the high awareness of the bees’ plight (see sidebar), and also the green and urban farm movements. Many cities and suburbs (including
Dana Stahlman, a Master Beekeeper and the president of the Central Ohio Beekeepers Association, encourages beekeeping wannabees to come to their meetings. “It’s too late in the season to start a hive this year,” he says, “but you can learn about it and meet other beekeepers.”
Bees on the honeycomb.
Honey Laundering:
Another Reason Artisanal Honey Is Better
Honey laundering is an amusing term with a sober meaning: the smuggling of tainted Chinese honey into the
The Chinese launder honey to avoid the heavy tariffs that the
And not only artificially cheap, but often artificial. In
In June the FDA announced a “new global strategy” to ensure import quality and safety, as well as its intention to broaden food safety efforts under the 2011 FDA Food Modernization Act. Meanwhile, the European Union has simply banned the import of “Indian” honey, a strategy that American beekeepers would like the
The
Bee warned.
PHOTO BY © JESSICA OPREMCAK
Photos: Isaac tending to beehives; Mason Barnes feeding the chickens;
Isaac's goats; jars of honey; Honeyrun Farm.
PHOTOS BY © CATHERINE MURRAY, PHOTOKITCHEN.NET
UNLESS OTHERWISE SPECIFIED
Sweet Success
Isaac removes the honey from his chemical-free hives in late spring, mid-summer and autumn, a task that takes 15—20 hours per harvest. “We harvested 10,000 pounds of honey in 2010,” Isaac says, “about 100 pounds per hive.
The state average is 55—60 pounds per hive.” Each season’s honey is different in color and flavor, with spring honey from black locust blossoms the lightest, the most popular and also the scarcest. “We sold out of locust honey this year — about 1,000 pounds of it.” The golden summer honey comes from Canadian thistle and clover; the dark fall honey, from goldenrod and aster.
Honey is anti-microbial and can rest at room temperature indefinitely, so once it leaves the hive, the honey in the wax comb need not be extracted immediately. “My first extractor only did four frames at a time,” Isaac says. “It took about a month to harvest the honey that way. But I figure that it takes a month to harvest a lot of crops.”
Today, a 33-frame extractor purchased from a beekeeper’s estate takes pride of place in the honey house. Once Isaac has scraped off the wax caps with a heated knife, the centrifuge whirls the frames for five to 10 minutes and the honey drains slowly (nothing about honey is fast) into a large bucket, where it sits, covered, until Isaac has time to deal with it.
Then he gently heats the honey to less than 120° F., strains it, bottles it and slaps on a Honeyrun Farms label. Isaac avoids the higher temperatures and high-pressure filtering used by commercial honey producers to prevent granulation, because, according to Catherine Berry, director of marketing at the National Honey Board, such processing “reduces the final quantity of the enzymes in honey.”
The leftover wax goes outside, where the thrifty bees eat any honey that still clings to it, after which thrifty Jayne melts the wax for the beeswax candles she sells at farmers markets and online.
The Buzz
“She’s the smart and savvy one,” Isaac says of Jayne. “She’s the one that does all the marketing.” And makes the soap.
“All the different varieties and scents — I just got hooked.” Jayne’s experiment began in the kitchen in 2006, but with sales last year of 3,000 bars, the operation moved to the honey house. Made with lye the old-fashioned, cold-processed way, the more than 20 varieties of soap contain herbs and flowers, many homegrown, beeswax to help the soap last longer and always honey, a natural moisturizer.
Jayne ships orders from their website to points as diverse
This year Honeyrun Farms debuted at the Worthington Farmers Market. The Greener Grocer at the North Market was their first retail customer, and last winter Jayne decided to try expanding the retail end by selling to Whole Foods in
“There were so many hoops to jump through,” Isaac says, displaying the final product, a Honeyrun Farms honey bear, labeled Ohio Summer Harvest or Ohio Fall Harvest Pure Raw Honey. “We thought the bear was corny, but they insisted. And they wanted the seasonal label with the outline of
“No,” Jayne reminds him.
“The little state map was our idea.”
“Right.” Isaac regards her fondly.
“This was all Jayne’s doing.”
“When I market, I look at why I’m drawn to a product,” Jayne says. “Our market is mostly direct and local, and our customers want that connection to the person and the process. On the blog I let people know how we make our products. I try to respond to email questions quickly, and we always invite people out to the farm, if they want to come.”
Their vision for the future, besides welcoming Baby Barnes in November, is simply more of the same. Their main challenge, Jayne suggests, is not to work too hard — “We’re both workaholics,” she confesses, as if no one would guess. “If we can keep it at this level, then whatever we can do is icing on the cake.”
Honey cake, of course.
Honeyrun Farm:
Nancy McKibben has been writing and eating for years, and is happy to combine those loves with the opportunity to advocate for local food in the pages of Edible Columbus. Her novel The Chaos Protocol was a finalist for the Ohioana Book Award for Fiction in 2000, and she was the winner of the Thurber House Essay Contest in 2003. She is also a lyricist and journalist, the mother of six, and the wife of one. View her work at leader.com/nancymckibben; contact her at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .
INFUSED HONEY
Courtesy of Jayne Barnes
1 cup honey
4 tablespoons of your favorite dried herb, try:
lavender
lemon verbena
mint or rosemary
1 Place in a jar sunny windowsill, stirring every few days until the honey has reached the flavor you prefer.
2. Strain our the herbs, and enjoy!
Bee Gone
Since 1975, the
CCD is not a new problem, as similar phenomena have been described since the 1800s. Tew likens the disorder to a cold: “You know the symptoms, but you don ‘t really know exactly what caused it.” CCD is more likely to affect large commercial beekeepers with thousands of hives who use their bees primarily for pollination, often transporting them thousands of miles to pollinate crops.
Tew lists factors that do or may affect bees adversely: viruses, pesticides, lack of genetic diversity (at least 1/3 of all
“Today ‘s bees are not as vibrant and resilient as they once were,” says Tew, who points out that bees used to survive easily on their own, without human intervention. “Bees could have a hive behind your barn, and the hive lived for years, and you never had to do anything with them. Today, bees need us. They have become more like tomato plants, having to be replaced every year.”
Master Beekeeper Dana Stahlman is hoping to help make the
Isaac Barnes, who has about 120 hives, has not experienced CCD, and focuses his energies on varroa mites, the plague of beekeepers everywhere. Isaac recalls the effort to control them in the commercial hives where he worked in
“That ‘s what ‘s working for us,” Isaac says diffidently. “We don ‘t have thousands of hives, so we can babysit the bees more.”
Resources for those interested in beekeeping:
Franklin County Zoning Resolution; Section 115.04 Regulation of Apiaries:
franklincountyohio.gov/commissioners/edp/zoning/ZoningResolutionUpdated6.9.10.pdf