My great-grandfather Newt ran an apiary in Boise, Idaho from the 1940s through the 1960s. His grandson — my uncle Larry — has been keeping bees for 75 years and still does. I grew up knowing what a hive was, what it sounded like, what it smelled like. I just didn't keep them myself. Not yet.
That changed when I started making tallow balm. I needed beeswax — clean, traceable beeswax from hives I could account for — and the knowledge to work with it was already in the family. My uncle taught me. I put up my first hives in the Sierra Nevada foothills and the Sacramento Valley, and Great Northern Apiary started the same way Great Northern Tallow did: out of a practical need, with a tradition behind it.
The hives run between two elevations now — Portola up in the mountains, and Loomis and Granite Bay down in the valley. The honey is different at each location. Different bloom, different season, different color and flavor. I don't blend them to even that out. The variation is the point.
The beeswax from these frames goes into every Great Northern Tallow balm and lip balm. If you've used the Woodland Citrus Balm or the Northern Frost Lip Balm, it came from here. That's the connection I wanted to build — not just a source, but a visible one.
The Hives
Right now I'm running colonies across two regions: the mountains around Portola, and the Sacramento Valley around Loomis and Granite Bay. The fall harvest came off the Granite Bay colonies in late September — dark, citrus-edged honey that reflects what the bees were working through August. Another 50 pounds or so is coming in the next few weeks.
The honey is raw and filtered through cheesecloth — nothing finer. It crystallizes over time. That's not a defect — it's what honey does when it hasn't been heat-treated. Warm the jar gently if you want it liquid; leave it as-is if you don't mind a spoonable texture. The flavor is the same either way.
Every batch is different from the last. I don't try to make them consistent across seasons. The land and the year are what they are, and the honey reflects that.