May at Honeyflow Farm
May candle winner: mochakasem@earthlink.net	May, 2004 Vol 4 No. 5

in this issue This Month's Special Priced Items This Month in the Candle Shop This Month in the Vineyard This Month at the Honey Farm From our readers Candle W*nner & Laugh of the Month This Month's Special Priced Items     All Votives on Sale Try a Rose, Lilac or Honeysuckle List Price: $10.25 Special Price: $8.20 Hound Dog Pillar List Price: $11.50 Special Price: $ 9.20     *************   Special pricing through May & June Complimentary votive's with orders over $25         Monthly Drawing One Pair of 9 inch hand dipped beeswax candles are mailed out each month to someone on our mailing list. (If you are receiving this message you are on our list and may soon receive a pair of candles - check for your name each month) Tell your friends about our farm. All they have to do is to subscribe to our monthly on-line newsletter to be elligible. In addition, every week in September we will also be giving away a bushel of grapes if you also subscribe to our September Weekly Picking Update. Tell your friends to SUBSCRIBE NOW           Candle Dipping at Honeyflow Farm Wicks for 6 pairs of candles are on a frame and dipped into hot wax.   6 pairs of candles half finished. The frame is split in half & only 3 pairs are now dipped.   The candles are hanging in a rack to cool between dips.   The finished product.         A few notes about our format: Although our newsletter has a "overview" of every article in the issue, a recent survey has shown us that we have two distinct and separate interest groups, a grape and winemaking group and a honey and candle group. Many of the articles in this newsletter have all the text included but sometimes, due to the length, we need to continue the article on a separate page on our website. We have developed our "Vineyard Report" and our "Candle/Honeyfarm Report" to conform to the specific interests of our readers.                   "It has been my experience that folks who have no vices have very few virtues." Abraham Lincoln The Quotations Page Visit our Candle Shop

Greetings! Greetings from Honeyflow Farm. Our monthly newsletter will keep you up to date on farm activities as they occur.   Although the U-Pick part of our farm is only open September to Mid October - our website is open all year!   At our Candle Shop you can purchase candles and honey products any time you wish.   In answering questions and in preparing this newsletter our newsletter archive has become a valuable source of material. It may answer many of the questions you have about honey, candles, wine making or about our farm. Click here to view past issues of our newsletter. This Month in the Candle Shop    New E-Commerce site is now on line, Additional changes to site have been made.   Click here to go directly to our Newsletter Candle Report. We finally have the new e- commerce program up and running. Clic k here to see our new Candle Search Engine. It is a program installed on our own server called "Quikstore." It will allow us a lot more flexibility. Some of the main things I like about it are: More accurate shipping rates - It will actually go to the USPS & UPS sites and automatically figure the charges. A search engine that you can enter a text description of a candle into. New Items - more cinnamon & bayberry candles. Since I can manipulate the pages, I can make any detailed changes that I like rather than be constrained to only what was available on the old program. We can also now take Amercan Express card.   Not everything is moved over yet. We still have a few things like Nativity Sets where we have not created the new pages yet, but we still have them available. Try Our New Search Page! You can search by an image or by entering text. We are also in the process of giving our whole site a new "paint job." All the pages will eventually have a new look. The Honeyfarm & Candle Shop are finished now. The rest will come later. ********************** Download our 30 page catalog with over 90 images. It has every item sold on our site. This pdf file can be saved on your computer. You can print the catalog and order through the US Mail if you wish, although it is still much easier to do it on line. Download our Candle Catalog This Month in the Vineyard    Vineyard in May - Pruning Pictures, Haight Vineyard, Sandy Paetz and Bernard Call, New MSU Grape Website, May Grape Recipe Click here to go directly to our Newsletter Vineyard Report.   **********************   We pruned the vineyard the week before Easter. Around 25 high school students showed up to help us. A lot was completed; vines were pruned, tied to the wires with twine, and more posts and wire were installed. Click here for pruning pictures. Click here to see how we prune our vines. May is "Frost Watch " month. Every day the buds on the vine get bigger and we move further away from the date of the last average freeze. However quite often mother nature has other ideas and we have had damaging frosts as late as Memorial Day. At this point - most of the vines look pretty good. **********************   Our daughter, Andrea (with Jeff & kids) were visiting us and stopped by Haight Vineyard in Connecticut on their way here. They attended a "barrell tasting" there, a special event to promote new wines of the season. Along with a typical nice riesing and chardonnay, they brought us a bottle of "Barely Blush." It was a mix of Seyval Blanc and Marechal Foch, a medium dry table wine with a nice soft finish. It was a good blend of these two grape varieties, the characteristics of each were still slightly discernable.   **********************   We just had another update about what Sandy Paetz is doing at the MSU Viticulture & Winemaking School - “pH and Acid Titration” Details .... More details about the MSU program .....   Bernard Call (another MSU student) stopped by last week with a bottle of late harvest vignoles. I missed him (I was out working bees) but he left a note saying that he was soon going to plant some reisling vines on 40 acres that he just purchased up in the Northern Michigan wine area. The wine was delicious, by the way. It was a heavy, rich, sweet white dessert wine. A very nice vignoles.   ********************** MSU Grape Website - Lots of very good information for the grape grower. Weather, vineyard scouting, pest management, cultural practices, links, study & training. MSU study & training programs - The Viticulture Program is a 16 to 24-month comprehensive program of study focused on the planning, establishment, and management of a vineyard. The Enology Program is also a 16 to 24-month program that emphasizes the chemistry and analytical techniques involved in wine production.   **********************   May Grape Recipe - Wine Cheese Spread From Warner Vineyards, Michigan Click here for the recipe ...... This Month in the Vineyard This Month at the Honey Farm    May at the Honey Farm - Package Bees are installed, Queen rearing is started, 7 Ponds Beekeeper Club Update, Antioxidant value in honey, May Honey Recipe! Click here to go directly to our Newsletter Honey Farm Report.   May at the Honey Farm - We just received and installed 25 package bees from Georgia. Many were installed in a new bee yard at "Millers Big Red Orchard" in Romeo, Michigan. Click here to see package bees being installed.   **********************   This month we will also start raising new queen bees from 2 breeder queens from Glenn Apiaries in California. These are special SMR mite resistant queens (1 Russian & 1 Carniolan) that we will use to raise new queens for the splits (new colonies) that we will make in May. This is another way to replace losses and also to improve the genetic quality of our colonies. We use small cages, part of the "Jenter" queen raising system, that the queen is put into for one day (we call it day 1). On the 5th day (day 5) small plastic cells on the back of the cage are removed with 1 day old larvae from our breeder queens. 20 - 30 of them are put on a frame and put into a queenless "cell builder hive". After the queen cells are sealed (about day 10) the cells are carefully removed and taken to new colonies that need new queens. They hatch out on day 17. Click here for queen cell pictures.   ********************** The "7 Ponds Beekeepers Club" just had it's third meeting and there were more than 30 people in attendance. It is loosely affiliated with South Eastern Michigan Beekeepers Association. It was held in 7 Ponds Nature Center, an affiliate of the Michigan Audubon Society, located in Dryden Township, Lapeer County, Michigan - only a few miles from us. This month, Roger Sutherland, from SEMBA had a demonstration about bee sting allergies. It's mission statement is to "Educate Beginning Beekeepers Through Mentoring Programs." It is a really great opportunity for new and seasoned beekeepers to meet. They get together the 4th Tuesday of the month from 7:30 to 9:00 p.m. For more information you can contact myself or Nancy Schleibe at 1-810-395-7379.   **********************   Antioxidant Research Captures Media Interest With funding from the National Honey Board, Heidrun B. Gross, nutrition researcher, and others at the University of California at Davis have been analyzing honey's effects on antioxidants. Information about the study has appeared in several leading publications. The story ......   **********************   May Honey Recipe - from Honey.com Sweet Summer Fruit Smoothie The recipe .... This Month at the Honey Farm From our readers    This is a section for comments/questions/recipes from our readers. Please read the comments & feel free to put your 2 cents worth in. Visit the Readers Comments page to view all the content of these messages. Here are samples of this months e-mails:   I found your red wine recipe,  ••  How are things at the vineyard going?  ••   The photos of the hives and honey process through the seasons was very interesting.  ••  I am a beginner looking for bees.  ••   I'm interested in buying 2 lb of honey.  ••   Wondering if you sell unfiltered wax, allergic to bee stings. The "From our Readers" Page Candle W*nner & Laugh of the Month    Congratulations! May candle winner: mochakasem@earthlink.net Will this months w*nner, mochakasem@earthlink.net please contact us and so that I can ship your candles. Our list of previous candle w*nners.   Click below for something silly to end this newsletter with. See You Next Month! Laugh of the month: Kaleidoscope

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