Chaparral Mountain Honey Co.

05/20/2025

Happy World Bee Day!

05/19/2025

Another Bug Fair weekend is over. We were so thankful to see you and grateful for your support. We loved the wide-eyed stares and excited questions from small children (and some adults) seeing bees 🐝 for the first time. We loved all the conversations with people considering starting beekeeping. 🍯 We loved seeing YOU again, who come every year to get a taste of sweetness. Eighty lucky people took home a gallon of our honey. Truly we wish we had had more but it was all we could put together this year, less than five months after the Eaton Fire. 🔥 We sold out of everything we had brought. We are planning for next year already as we rebuild with your support. We hope to have Orange Blossom honey, and maybe some honey from the summer fire follower blooms in the hills. See you next time!

05/17/2025

We made it! We couldn’t miss the Bug Fair.

05/13/2025

We hope to see you this weekend at the Bug Fair! We will have honey for sale in 1-gal quantities only, plus honey sticks and honees, and these beautiful posters to help us raise funds for restoration.

04/29/2025

As you know, all of our hives burned in the Eaton Fire, including our hand-built four-frame observation beehives. Bruce is busily building new ones for this year's Bug Fair. We will be there!

03/11/2025

We have always had some bees on the property, even when we had no beehives. There are bees in the foothills! Here is one that spent time wandering around on Bruce's bee suit while he was working the other day.

03/03/2025

During the last week of February we mobilized volunteers to help us remove and store some buckets of honey that looked like they might be ok. Here's hoping we will have some honey that we can sell!

Many thanks to our volunteers: Alex, Bianca, Bubu, Chelsi, Candice, Derek, DJ, Meron, Natty, Nolan, John, Brian, Aubrey, and of course, Clara who organized everything.

But this is a small fraction of the honey we had in storage. And we won't make any honey this season and maybe not next either. It all depends on how well the chaparral recovers. A fire happening in January is brutal to the plants that were just getting ready to bloom in April.

02/22/2025

The Guardian published an article about our loss.

Bruce and Nancy Steele had a business that produced honey for the past 30 years before the Eaton fire destroyed it

02/20/2025

I love the bight orange pollen from these aloes. Honeybees are doing their job.

01/27/2025

Thank you to everyone who has been supporting us after we lost our home and beekeeping business - 188 beehives were burned up. If you'd also like to support other beekeepers impacted by the hives, here is that Go Fund Me.

We would like to help the members in Los Angeles County who not o… Charlene Potter needs your support for Restore Fire Losses by LA County Beekeepers and Bees

01/19/2025

Update: The first 2 pics are a before and after of one of five apiaries destroyed by the Eaton fire. There were 22 hives and lots of honey supers. The second pic is of the largest apiary with 94 hives, also with lots of honey supers. This level of destruction was unimaginable, and yet now we have to live with it. However, the loss of the bees represents a small window into remembering the diversity of and how much wildlife also perished in this conflagration, unable to escape its rapid advance. Although it’s unpleasant and depressing, I’ve lived long enough to be able to project 5 years out, when chaparral is into its recovery and flowers are blooming again. It’s one of the things that helps temper the emotions of the recent losses.

01/11/2025

Can I just say that you all are the best! Your outpouring of support is so heartwarming. We can hardly bee-lieve it (too soon for a pun?). Because we can only take so much heartache, here is a photo of Bruce above the house. He is always about nature and providing water to wildlife is part of that. We'll have more updates about the beekeeping business soon.