The honey produced in these areas carries the flavors of the myriad of vegetables, raspberries, blueberries, and cultivated flowers blended with wild blackberry from the dense hedges beyond the farms’ boundaries.

The weather, crops and the flowers vary with every year, which gives each harvest of Brookfield Farm’s Farm And Field Honey a unique flavor.

 No pesticides, antibiotics, or chemicals are used in the hives.  The honey also carries a Predator Friendly Certification from Keystone Conservation

 Sharing their mountain farm with wildlife is important to Karen Bean and Ian Balsillie, who are Brookfield Farm.  Their land is home to creatures which range from bears and cougars to opossums and mice. Bean and Balsillie have never harmed or killed any predator, except mice. “Our livestock guard dog protects the goats and bee hives from the bears and mid-sized predators, but the ‘bee guard cat’ can’t always keep up with the mice,” Bean sighs.  She keeps mouse guards on her hives year round.

Brookfield Farm began as a fiber farm nearly 20 years ago.  In 2003 Bean was introduced to beekeeping and acquired two hives of Russian bees. “I fell in love with the bees,” she explains.  “Beekeeping is science and nature and art and just plain luck all rolled together.  And you don’t have to muck out the barn.” 

 Today Bean averages 50 hives, with a goal to have 100 hives.  “Beekeeping’s a challenge, that’s what makes it fun,” she says.  “For me, one of the most fascinating things about beekeeping is how the bees adapt to their constantly changing environment, be it reduction of egg-laying when there’s no nectar or the ‘I’m not dead yet’ scenes as the girls heave the drones out the door as winter approaches.”

 Bean has expanded her apiary primarily through splits (creating a new hive by using eggs, brood, and nurse bees from a parent hive). She allows the majority of her hives to raise their own queens. New queens are also purchased to expand the genetic stock in the bee yard.  The surviving hives requeen themselves through open mating. “My goal,” Bean says,” is to have bees that are adapted to the cold, wet environment here near Mt. Baker, and can survive diseases and parasites without the use of chemicals and antibiotics.”