Berthoud-based Bee Squared Creating Craft Honey, Providing Education

By Kyle Kirves

Beth Conrey of Bee Squared apiary in Berthoud has stinging words for a certain favorite go-to leafy green. “Honey,” she says “is the original super food and it tastes a lot better than kale.”

No argument here. If you’ve had any of Bee Squared’s locally produced honeys, you know kale never stood a chance – especially when it comes to some of their recent collaborations with a distillery and a farm.

“We’ve worked with three local distillers to make whiskey barrel-aged honey,” she says.

Now hold it right there. Whiskey barrel-aged honey? If I can spread that on an English muffin, it might just turn me into – gasp! – a morning person.

“What we do,” Conrey continues, “is we take our raw alfalfa honey and age it in the barrels.”

It’s a specialty honey with broad appeal that brings a distinct and aged flavor to what finds its way from hive to jar. And I have it on good authority that at least one of those distillers – Lyons’ own Spirit Hound Distillers – reclaims those barrels to finish their whiskeys in. Now that’s sweet stuff indeed.

Beyond spirits, other team-ups include one with Fort Collins’ Happy Heart Farm for a rose petal-infused honey. It’s a Good Food-award winner for outstanding American craft product in its category, and Conrey said it was “absolutely outstanding.” This particular infusion returns in September for release. They also jar honeys with local terroir, including clover-based honeys.

Home to over 100 hives, Bee Squared is “where bees live,” as Conrey says. Evidently, like a millennial software developer, they work a lot from home. The busy bees help Bee Squared produce marvelous all-natural beeswax candles, soaps and pollens. Pollen treatments, as many doctors and veterinarians will tell you, is one of the surest ways to build up resistance against allergens. Beyond its well-known use as a sweetener, honey is a good treatment for wounds. Apiaries, it would seem, are nature’s apothecaries.

Education, too, is part of the mission at Bee Squared. Ask yourself this: How many species of bee are there in Colorado? Ten? Fifty? Full disclosure: I guessed 12.

“There are 950 different species of bee in the state,” Conrey says. “They are incredibly biodiverse. And the honey bee is the only colony bee capable of producing honey. But the rest of them do outstanding pollination and environmental services for free.”

Turning serious, Conrey explains that those bees are seriously threatened by pesticide use and other petrochemicals. The good news is that anyone can be a bee hero. “The simplest action is to plant native flowers and organic seed and not spray them,” Conrey explains.

That can’t be overstated. When you’re asking yourself what you can do, right now, to have a positive impact on the environment for yourself and those who will inherit the earth, it’s being a friend of the bee. As Conrey says, “People should know that fully one third of everything they eat is dependent on pollinators. If you like food, you like bees.”

That should be reason enough to turn all of us into bee-lievers.