Honey for Good

Honey for Good Promoting and finding the answers to create a world that is safe for bees.

The Center for Honeybee Research is about: bees, honeybees, research, education, workshops, natural beekeeping, genetics, survivor stock, queenless splits, nucs, nucleus colonies, foundationless frames, bee schools, top bar hives, international honeybee research and information exchange, integrated pest management, non-treatment, chemical-free, beekeeping, epigenetics, pollinators, scientific beek

eeping, honeybee nutrition, honey, pollen, propolis, nectar, apitherapy, sustainable beekeeping, beeswax, environmentally friendly beekeeping, sustainability, resistant bees, unlimited broodnest, varroa resistance, italian honeybees, caucasian honeybees, VSH honeybees, Carniolan honeybees, Russian honeybees, africanized honeybees, swarms, clusters, drones, workers, larva, larvae, capped cells, drawn comb, foundation, frames, hive tool, smoker, feeders, inner covers, supers, extracting, entomologists, apiarists, bee yards, benches, screened bottom boards, screened inner covers, propolis tincture, over-wintered nucs.

Bee Grants are open. 🐝The The Bee Cause Project just kicked off its 2026 grant cycle, and it's one of our favorite resou...
09/01/2026

Bee Grants are open. 🐝

The The Bee Cause Project just kicked off its 2026 grant cycle, and it's one of our favorite resources to point people toward. If you're a school or nonprofit ready to bring pollinator education into your community, there are two paths — a Traditional Bee Grant to start a brand-new program with a starter hive and funding, or a Renewal Bee Grant to grow one that's already up and running.

The Bee Cause Project (with support from the Whole Foods Market Foundation) is also hosting an overview webinar and a live Q&A for anyone applying.

Know a classroom, garden club, or community group who'd run with this? Send them this post!

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It has been such a treat to open the honey entries from all over the world! 🌎Some of them contain treasures, like the en...
08/31/2026

It has been such a treat to open the honey entries from all over the world! 🌎

Some of them contain treasures, like the enclosures from this young entrant from Japan, and we couldn't be more excited to have the next generation excited about bees and beekeeping.

Thank you to all who submitted their honey for this year's contest. Preliminary judging will take place over the next few weeks, with the category and grand prize winner announced at the Gala on October 16th!

🍯 🐝

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For one night this October, the honey won't be the only thing wearing a disguise. 🖤🐝Save the date: the Black Jar Masquer...
08/29/2026

For one night this October, the honey won't be the only thing wearing a disguise. 🖤🐝

Save the date: the Black Jar Masquerade Gala arrives Friday, October 16, at 7:00.

If you know how our International Black Jar Honey Contest works, the theme writes itself.

Every entry goes into a numbered glass jar, then into a small black bag that hides its color, clarity, and grain. The judges taste blind — no name, no origin, no idea whose honey is whose.

Pure flavor, zero bias.

So of course we're all showing up in masks. 🎭

More details coming soon.

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Ask a Southern Appalachian beekeeper to name the finest honey there is, and you'll probably hear one word: sourwood. 🍯It...
08/27/2026

Ask a Southern Appalachian beekeeper to name the finest honey there is, and you'll probably hear one word: sourwood. 🍯

It comes from the sourwood tree, a native Appalachian tree that flowers across these mountains in the heat of midsummer with little bell-shaped blooms. The honey it makes is light and buttery with a spiced finish that's hard to forget, and it's widely considered one of the best varietal honeys in the entire country.

The best part? Its season is just beginning. If you've only ever had honey from a plastic bear, a jar of true local sourwood will ruin you for anything else (in the best possible way).

Ever tasted the real thing? 👇

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The single most helpful thing you can do for pollinators this fall? Honestly, a little less yard work. 🍂🐝As the garden w...
08/25/2026

The single most helpful thing you can do for pollinators this fall?

Honestly, a little less yard work. 🍂🐝

As the garden winds down, resist the urge to cut everything to the ground and rake it all away. Loads of native bees spend the winter tucked inside hollow plant stems, and a layer of fallen leaves shelters pollinators and beneficial insects through the cold months.

So leave the standing stems. Leave a blanket of leaves in the beds. Let the messy corners stay a little messy. Your yard turns into winter housing, and you get to put the rake down.

Permission to do less: granted. 🙌🏻

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One afternoon, honey from right down the road and from the other side of the planet, all on the same tasting table. ☀️🍯T...
08/20/2026

One afternoon, honey from right down the road and from the other side of the planet, all on the same tasting table. ☀️🍯

That's the part we love: every jar tastes like where it came from. Clover fields, mountain wildflowers, orange groves. Same insect, wildly different results. 🌻

It's the whole idea behind our International Black Jar Honey Contest, too — honey judged on taste alone, from beekeepers anywhere in the world, with zero clue about who made it or where.

Just one question: is it good?

The preliminary rounds of blind judging are underway across North Carolina. 🍯

This year's winner will be announced at a special Black Jar Masquerade Gala on October 16th!

Stay tuned.

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Here's a strange, wonderful one: baby honeybees don't really smell their food. They taste their way through the world in...
08/18/2026

Here's a strange, wonderful one: baby honeybees don't really smell their food. They taste their way through the world instead. 🐝

New research out of the University of Illinois found that honeybee larvae have their smell-receptors dialed way down while they grow. Grown-up bees are famous for their incredible sense of smell — but as babies, tucked in their wax cells and fed around a hundred times a day, they lean entirely on taste.

So the whole colony is, quite literally, built on good taste. (We happen to know a honey contest that would approve.) 😉

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We had such a great time at the Sourwood Festival last weekend!Huge shout-out to our incredible volunteers who helped ma...
08/15/2026

We had such a great time at the Sourwood Festival last weekend!

Huge shout-out to our incredible volunteers who helped make it happen: Eddie and his son, Josiah, our longtime volunteer, Ellen, and some die-hard friends from Buncombe County Beekeepers Club - BCBC who got our booth set up in a downpour. Y'all are the best!!

It takes a village, and we appreciate ours. 💛

Thanks to everyone who stopped by, learned more about Honey for Good, and purchased honey and jarred honeycomb from our recent home-cutout at Eddie's house. 🍯

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You'd assume the queen runs the hive, wouldn't you? Perched on a throne, handing out assignments, sending memos? 🐝She do...
08/11/2026

You'd assume the queen runs the hive, wouldn't you? Perched on a throne, handing out assignments, sending memos? 🐝

She does no such thing. A honeybee colony decides where to forage, when to stay home, and even where to build a new house — all with nobody in charge. And new math from the University of Cincinnati just worked out how they pull it off so well.

The strategy: a daring few and a patient many. A small handful of bees take the risk of foraging in any conditions — cold, wet, slim pickings — while the majority hang back and only fly out when things look promising. Those risk-takers double as scouts. The moment conditions improve, the whole hive knows it's safe to go.

And here's the part that surprised the researchers: a colony ten times bigger doesn't need ten times the daredevils. As long as everyone stays connected and shares what they learn, a few brave scouts is plenty.

No manager. No meetings. Just 50,000 insects quietly out-organizing most boardrooms. 💛

So which would you be — one of the daring few, or the patient many? 👇

When we say "save the bees," this is the part you don't usually see. 🐝Recently, board members Walker and Tricia drove ou...
08/09/2026

When we say "save the bees," this is the part you don't usually see. 🐝

Recently, board members Walker and Tricia drove out to a home in Leicester for a cutout — that's when a wild colony sets up house somewhere it shouldn't (this time, beneath the floorboards), and a beekeeper carefully removes it and relocates it to a proper hive instead of calling an exterminator. Inside, they found mountains of honey, the queen, and several capped queen cells — a colony in great shape. 🐝

The homeowner wanted these bees rescued rather than wiped out. So Honey For Good stepped in to cover the cost. Because when someone's ready to do right by the bees, the last thing we want in the way is the price tag.

The bees win. The homeowner wins. And a healthy colony gets a second act. 🙌🏻

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22 Cedar Hill Rd
Asheville, NC
28806

Telephone

+18287797047

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