Bees Blessing is located on Kau Whero (Red Cow) Farm, a 22ha block in the beautiful Mangaroa Valley, close to Upper Hutt City in Wellington, NZ. The business is run by Jo and Ian and our 4 yr old daughter Emare keeps a keen eye on things! We live in a 100 year old converted stable which was moved here 15 years ago and is surrounded by beautiful trees shrubs and gardens.

animals

On the farm we have our bees, a Red Poll cattle stud, a small flock of Light Sussex chickens and we often have sheep and pigs. There is also Mr Stripey the cat, who loves to catch rabbits!. We have a very large organic vegetable garden, an organic orchard of over 150 fruit trees and lots of nut trees.

plants and vegetables

Our philosophy is to work with nature and have a balanced farm that produces a wide range of healthy food without harming the environment. It is very important to us that our animals are treated with kindness and dignity. We are hoping to have the farm entirely organic within the next two years.

bees and honey

Along with our other animals and a large vegetable garden, we keep bees. The beehives on our farm produce a clover honey early in the season and then a lovely tasty bush honey with manuka, rata and rewa rewa nectar, later in the season, giving it depth and complexity. We also have hives on the Kapiti Coast which make a mellow clover/blackberry honey which works particularly well with our health drinks.

Our bee keeping philosophy is to manage productive healthy hives without trying to over produce. We keep our intervention to the hives natural cycles to a minimum and ensure that they have enough natural stores so that they do not need artificial sugar feeding. Where possible we manage the hive organically, but we cannot produce organic honey as we cannot stop the bees from collecting nectar from neighbouring properties. While we build our hives in number, we are currently using a beautiful Organic Blue Borage honey from the Kaikouras in our products.