Cultivating healthy, productive bee colonies is an important component of maintaining and improving the ecosystem and biodiversity.
Our beehives play a relatively small yet significant role in pollinating and regenerating vegetation throughout the Sierra Cacachilas mountains and in the San Juan de los Planes valley.
Vegetation, in turn, is a fundamental part of many cycles within our ecosystem, including those of water, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and energy. Keeping our apiaries functioning well is one of many factors that helps us manage our whole environment more effectively.
We place hives in various locations throughout the ranches near permanent water sources and specific vegetation to help the bees prosper and to maximize pollination activities.
Beekeeping at Rancho Cacachilas
We inspect the hives regularly for signs of health and in the spring and late summer we harvest the honey using centrifugal extractors. To assist with scheduling the harvesting, we monitor the various species of plants, including native damiana shrubs, that bloom throughout our ranches.
Local Honey Production
An additional benefit of maintaining bees is that we produce delicious, healthy honey that we offer to visitors on our ranches. The warm, earthy tones of our 100% pure honey are created by our bees, which collect nectar from ranch desert blooms. With support from bee-breeding specialist Juana Agudo, an advisor on beehive management for the municipality of La Paz, two of our ranchers, Juan Carlos and Benigno, are trained to take care of our valuable pollinators.
Our honey is raw meaning that is is unprocessed and remains in its natural state.
We never feed our bees anything but their own honey (many beekeepers feed high fructose corn syrup in the dry season but we simply harvest less honey if we see that they will need it).
Our honey ranges in color from very light yellow to red to even almost black depending on the season and what's in bloom.
We have also started making creamed/spun honey that is for sale at the local farmers markets & The Mountain & Bike Hub!
join our bee workshop !
and get to know the incredible world of bees, their vital importance to the world as well as the care work and responsible honey harvest we do in Rancho Cacachilas. We are waiting for you!
