over the course of the fair, 40 000 worker bees were released into the case to complete
a wax honeycomb structure over the figure of a martyred christ rising out of the chaos,
his weight seeming to be upheld by the mass strength of the swarm. the figure within the vitrine
is made of a laser sintered framework in which the industrious bees created a honeycomb skin over
before filling each cell with the honey they produce. then bees worked to remove the honey
from the cells and return it to the beehive, cleaning the figure back to the wax cells they
originally created. tomáš made the honeycomb a red-orange color to symbolize the cross.

We’re going to take the downtime to continue raising bees and learning to raise them right. We think it is important to keep bees naturally, free of antibiotics and HFCS. So when we come back, it’ll be more of the same: local, fresh, and natural honey.

Thanks to everybody who supported us over the last couple of seasons. We’ll see you again soon!

Sticky Mouth

Having the Herald come out to check the bees with us was a great way to kick off the 2010 season.

Despite the seemingly overwhelming evidence that Sticky Mouth is in trouble, Sustainable Resource Development Minister Mel Knight can’t decide whether grizzlies should be treated as a Threatened Species – he’s asked his colleagues for help. This is where we come in.

Carl Morrison of Action Grizzly Bear has put together this letter, which will be sent directly to Mel Knight and Ed Stelmach. In addition, you can find your MLA here and copy the same letter to them (or one of your own).

Sticky Mouth might find her way into the odd beehive sometimes, but woodenware is replaceable; a species isn’t.

Bad news for BC’s berry producers.

Good news for urban beekeepers in New York.

Food

Making food safe or ruining food with safety?

A scary thought: the US thinks our standards are too lax.

In 2008, Olds College commenced operation of the province’s first mobile abattoir, a pilot project headed up by Alberta Agriculture and Food. A 53-foot trailer pulled by a semi-truck, the mobile abattoir is a fully functional meat processing facility, capable of handling a carcass right from the kill to the packaging and chilling.

This isn’t anything too new: much has been made of mobile abattoirs throughout Canada over the last decade, particularly in some regions of Alberta where abattoir capacity is constrained. Lars Jorgensen, a former Vancouver chef, began operating a mobile unit licensed for beef, buffalo, and lamb in Northern BC last year, with plans to operate a Canada-wide fleet in the future; before that, the Yukon government put Canada’s first mobile abattoir on the road in 2007.

Mobile abattoirs are expensive to run, but because of the transport costs involved with shipping cattle to provincial abattoirs, they end up being cheaper, particularly for small producers.

I hear Olds College intends to sell their unit early in 2010. Imagine a CSA with a mobile abattoir as its centerpiece. It would be able to process meat from organic producers, those with too small a scale to make shipping it out to Cargill profitable; it would also handle game and niche meats, and provide small, local farmers with a direct link to their customers. And you can’t discount the improved quality of life for the animal, not having to be jostled onto a crowded trailer and shipped off to die. In fact, there is some evidence that lower stress translates to increased tenderness in an animal’s meat.

These units are costly to build, running upwards of $250,000, and they won’t replace large industrial abattoirs. But they do have many benefits, including the environmental and economic benefits inherent in supporting local agriculture. More numbers are needed to determine whether this unit is viable for a CSA or a private operator in Alberta, but hopefully there are some interested people willing to look into it when it goes up for sale next year. I’ll be following it and posting what I find out here.

Here’s an article from the Olds College News with some more details on the mobile abattoir; here is one on Lars Jorgensen; and here is one on the Yukon’s mobile abattoir.