Welcome to BEAR CREEK RUN, LLC WITH A SISTER COMPANY aPIARY OF BEAR CREEK
About Us
Volunteering in Woodinville
We here at Bear Creek Run & Apiary of Bear Creek we look forward to offering you the latest information on pollinator’s and environmental preserving the health of our ecosystem.
Sweet As Honey
Working with honey bees gives you the unique opportunity to look inside a complex system of interactions. Some scientists classify a colony of social insects as a “superorganism.” This is because the members of the colony act with singular purpose.
All of the activities of the individual are executed for the benefit of the colony. As we grow familiar with the patterns and activities of the honey bee you begin to see the superorganism, that is the colony, manifest. Sometimes you even hear beekeepers refer to individual hives as “fussy” or “passive.” So, as we work with honey bees, we begin to see the complexity of the hive. As complex as the structure of the colony is, it seems so simple when compared to the colony's relationship to the ecosystem!
Maple Syrup is a traditional, simple, natural food that has been enjoyed in many shapes and forms for millennia. Red squirrels have been known to nibble twigs in spring, allowing the sap to run down the bark of the tree. The sun would dry the sap into a thin streak of syrup that squirrels will later return to lick and enjoy.
The Native Americans indigenous to north eastern North America also discovered the spring run of sweet maple sap, and developed methods to harness and condense it. Using birch bark buckets, they would gather sap, and then heat stones in a fire to be placed in the buckets, evaporating the sap into a thick, rich syrup.
When the colonists arrived, they learned from the Native peoples about this seasonal source of sugar early in spring. The colonist crafted wooden buckets to collect the sap, and the tin smiths bent and soldered tin pans to boil the sap into syrup. Wood fires were burnt under the pans to generate the heat necessary to boil the syrup. The high heat of the wood fire licking at the pans gave the syrup a robust, caramelized, smokey, “mapley” flavor (ask the old timers around our parts and “mapley” is the adjective they use for the strong flavor of good maple syrup). The lighter colored syrup was called fancy because it could be made into an off-white, mildly flavored table sugar that could be compared to cane sugar, which was at the time a luxury import in northern New England. The two grade A’s were medium amber and dark amber, which were a valuable export for Vermont’s burgeoning rural economy. Then there was the “grade B” syrup, which was anything but B grade. It became the syrup of choice for the majority of Washingtonian’s. With its robust flavor and intimidating color, it was harder to market out of state in a glass bottle compared to the beautiful ambers, and so earned the grade B title, but the intense flavor quickly endeared it to those who had tried them all, and knew good flavor when they tasted it. Then and now B (now known as Dark and Robust) is preferred in complex recipes where a lighter syrup might be overpowered by other ingredients.
Since 2020 we have been developing our sugarbush with the goal of producing sustainably harvested maple syrup at a scale that is right for both the ecology and economy in which we exist. We do our best to provide syrup as cost effectively as possible in order to give our customers the opportunity restock their shelves frugally, or retail the syrup for profit.
We harvest our sap on site and process it with a wood fired evaporator fueled by wood generated from improvement cutting of our bush. We spent our first two years tapping our own trees, but trading the sap to our neighbors for processing in exchange for a percentage of the crop. Although this was not our end goal for a production technique, it allowed us to focus on growing slowly and steadily into something we could be proud of. Please continue to follow our journey….
COVID-19 UPDATE
We are monitoring the situation and adapting to updated safety protocols and recommendations, and we will continue to do so. We’ll regularly be in touch with you about this evolving issue and are always available to answer questions.
About Us
Holiday Food Pantry
The holidays are fast approaching and Bear Creek Run is excited to open a food pantry at this time, Thursday’s are the best day of the week for us and carry limited hours. If you know of a family and/or a church that is in need please go to the bottom of our website and leave a comment and someone will return the email request. Thank you again for helping our communities.