announcing Montana Coffee Traders and Glacier County Honey!

We are pleased as punch to announce that Montana Coffee Traders, our favorite purveyor of caffeine, Mayhem bars, and delicious soups in Flathead County, is now using our honey in their kitchens, and selling our 1# bottles to you, too!

Right now, MCT is carrying the 1# bottles at their Highway (5810 Hwy 93 S, Whitefish) and Columbia Falls (30 9th St W) locations, but it will also soon be available at the Kalispell (328 W. Center St) and Whitefish (110 Central Ave) locations, too.  Please, stop by for a fresh bottle and tell Montana Coffee Traders thanks for its commitment to local business and the highest quality honey money can buy.

And get us an Americano, with cream, and French Roast, black, to go.  Thanks!

2013.  Glacier County Honey Co.  All Rights Reserved.

 

announcing: Chief Mountain Honey + Glacier County Honey

As y’all know, Honeydew is a 2nd generation beekeeper.  In the 1970s, Honeydew’s dad, Bob Fullerton, started what eventually became Chief Mountain Honey Co., and as a result Honeydew grew up keeping bees, packing honey, and making beeswax candles.  Eventually, Honeydew worked for Chief Mountain Honey and started Chief Mountain Pollination.  When Honeydew and I were married, we founded our own company, Glacier County Honey Co., and Bob carried on with Chief Mountain Honey.

This spring, Bob decided to retire from the retail aspect of Chief Mountain Honey — though never from beekeeping! — and he passed the Chief Mountain retail torch to us.  We are so proud to offer honey under the label that Honeydew grew up with, a label that has enjoyed a 30+ year relationship with the folks who flock to Glacier National Park in the summertime and the folks who live here year round, too.

Under the Chief Mountain Honey label, we offer 12oz honeybears, 1# squeeze skeps, 2.5# tubs, and 5# tubs.  All of these containers are available for purchase at www.glaciercountyhoney.com, along with our Glacier County Honey stix, 8oz, 1#, 3#, and 5# squeeze bottles, and 12# and 35# buckets.

Chief Mountain Honey is also available all over Glacier County and Glacier National Park.  Please look for our “new” label at Thronson’s in Babb; the Leaning Tree and Two Sisters near Babb; Johnson’s and Park Cafe in St. Mary; Faught’s, IGA, and Glacier Family Foods in Browning; Albertson’s in Cut Bank; Glacier Park Trading Post in East Glacier; and more!   A complete list of our retailers is available here.

Here’s to the next generation!

2013.  Glacier County Honey Co.  All Rights Reserved.

 

Glacier County Honey Co. + Hiking for Diabetes

Chances are good that you know someone who is managing diabetes  – it affects 8.3% of the population.

Well, if you didn’t before, now you do.  Please meet T.J. Fallon, an insulin dependent Type 1 Diabetic who plans on hiking about 250 miles in Glacier National Park this summer in an effort to raise awareness about diabetes.  Glacier County Honey Co. is impressed by his mission, so we’re helping to sponsor his cause, and he’ll be hiking with our honey stix.

T.J. is 33 years old and a resident of Kalispell.  He has been successfully managing his diabetes for 18 years now.  If you’d like to learn more about his cause, T.J. has a great website — check it out here.

Good luck, T.J.!  We’ll hope to bump into you on the trails this summer.

2013.  Glacier County Honey Co.  Photo credits to T.J. Fallon.  All Rights Reserved.

 

attention Missoula!

We’ve partnered up with the Liquid Planet, an awesome specialty beverage and gift store in downtown Missoula, and the Community Food Agriculture Coalition of Missoula County, to bring you this month’s specialty drink: the Missoula Mate!

A mate is a traditional South American drink made from steeping the dried leaves of yerba mate. In this case, it’s blended with milk and pure, raw, 100% natural Glacier County Honey. Dee-lish.

During March, $1 from each drink supports the Community Food Agriculture Coalition.

Sweet sipping for a good cause? And you can now pick up our honey stix, 1# and 1/2# containers of honey at Liquid Planet, too …

Cheers!

2013. Glacier County Honey Co. All Rights Reserved.

 

introducing Brix Bottleshop … AND a new coupon code!

Loyal blog readers, thank you for indulging us over the last several months, as we’ve used this blog as more of a marketing platform than as a center for prose.  We hope to return to musings on life in Glacier National Park’s shadows and more very soon.

But we truly appreciate those retailers who decide to take the plunge and carry our products, and it seems wrong to us not to let our customers in various areas know when there is a new retailer to support!  So.

That said, meet Brix Bottleshop, newly opened in the historic Loading Dock in downtown Kalispell!  Brix is carrying our honey and our beeswax candles, along with some of our other favorite things: quality beer and wine, yummy offerings from other small farmers, and more!  If you’re downtown, check ’em out at 101 East Center St, #102:

Brix is owned by Karen Sanderson, a lovely gal and fifth generation Flatheader – that’s saying something, in Montana.  Congrats to Karen on her new venture!    You can give her a ring at 406-393-2202.

And now, for enduring another marketing post, here’s your reward — write BEEMERRY in the comment box of any www.glaciercountyhoney.com order and we’ll take 20% off any beeswax candle or ornament in your basket!  But be patient – our website is small, and won’t take the percentage automatically.  The website will email the order to us and if you paid via PayPal, we will refund the percentage via PayPal; if you chose the invoice option for credit/debit/check, we’ll e-mail you an invoice reflecting the percentage.  Offer good through Saturday, December 15.  Happy shopping!

2012.  Glacier County Honey Co.  All Rights Reserved.

 

on loving November, and the realities of saving the date … for deals!

We love Thanksgiving.  We love posting lists of what we’re thankful for, we love baking cranberry clafoutis, we love brining enormous Hutterite turkeys, and we love seeing hunting husbands bring home giant hunks of game.

We loathe seeing Thanksgiving rushed over in favor of Christmas-Hannukah-Kwaanza-Festival-of-Lights-Whatever-You-Celebrate-in-December.

However, we do making our living, in part, in retail.  And so we’re announcing a few special dates just to our devoted blog readers and Facebook fans, in case you’re thinking Glacier County Honey Co. retail will be part of your December.  And we hope you are, even as we pretend that November isn’t crashing into December.

Save the dates to maximize your savings!

Black Friday – 15% off all beeswax candles, ornaments and retail bars/blocks with code BLOG15*

Small Business Saturday – 15% off all retail honey jars – 8oz, 1#, 3#, 5# with code BLOG15*

Cyber Monday – 15% off all apparel …

… and accessories with code BLOG15*

Plus, established customers — i.e. those who’ve ordered from us before November 1, 2012 — will soon be receiving a mailing offering a coupon code applicable December 2 -4 — this coupon code includes a percentage off shipping!*

*none of these deals apply to 12# or 35# buckets of honey, nor to bulk beeswax, i.e. 20# blocks — they’re already deeply discounted, y’all – thanks for understanding*

*also, when you enter the code into the comment box, don’t despair when it doesn’t automatically deduct the percentage — our website is small, like our business, and not that fancy — after your credit card is processed, we’ll refund you the 15% — if you’re paying by invoice, we’ll send you an adjusted invoice by e-mail*

Now, let’s get back to enjoying all things pumpkin, turkey, and football!  Welcome, November.

2012.  Glacier County Honey Co.  All Rights Reserved.

 

July 4, 2012: Getting Ready for the Best Day of the Year!

There’s really not much down time in commercial beekeeping – although we’re done with pulling and extracting honey, we don’t sit around twiddling our thumbs until it’s time for pollination, shaking, splitting, and requeening.  There is wax to melt, equipment to build and repair, retail orders to bottle, candles to pour and package, industry meetings to attend, inventory to take, honey to deliver to landowners … the list seems endless at times.

But the waning sunlight does mean that we tend to quit closer to 5pm than to 9pm, and that means time to clean up the books, polish up the website, tend to the blog, and open the mail.  Our friend Marc Ankenbauer sent us a CD of awesome photographs he took during our 2nd Annual 4th of July Parade & Potluck, and we finally had a moment to sit down and review them — with absolute delight.

Marc is a neat guy, and one of those friends that keeps popping up in our lives.  I memorably ran into Marc on a remarkable September evening at the foot of Glenn’s Lake, years ago, riding out a soaking rain/snow storm under a tarp in a backcountry campground, playing cards and drinking whiskey with mutual friends.  But I didn’t know until Marc mailed us the fabulous CD of pictures that he is on a one man, ten years in the making, mission to be the first person to jump into every last one of Glacier National Park’s named lakes — there are 168 of these frigid, remote beauties, and Marc only has 12 to go!

Why in the world is Marc doing this?  Well, in addition to being an adventurer — a recent check of his blog reveals that he’s accepted winter employment in Antartica! — Marc is survivor of youth cancer, and has a heart of gold to boot.  He’s  raising money via his Glacier Explorer project to benefit Camp Mak-A-Dream, giving kids and young adults with cancer a medically supervised once-in-a-lifetime experience in the Montana wilderness.  That’s pretty darn cool.  He’s a little over half way to his goal, and you can donate, and check out his fun blog detailing his jumps, here.

Marc — above — took so many fabulous photographs of our 4th of July festivities that we’re going to devote several days to recapping the 4th – enjoy!  And remember, only eight months till July, and the next Parade – y’all should join us!

Glacier County Honey Co. decided to decorate the forklift basket, in hopes of finding bikini-ed gals along Duck Lake who wanted to dance in it.

You’ll have to check back tomorrow to find out if that mission was successful.

So happy to see Canadian-born, dual-citizenship-holding, Honeydew carrying THE flag around our parking lot!  What a great shot of him.

There was a lot of decorating in the hour leading up to the parade.  Here, Neil and Chuck got the approaching-senility-1987-Chevy-Cavalier looking snappy!

JC borrowed Chuck’s 4 wheeler, and it never looked finer.

Duck Lake, where we live just east of Babb, boasts a large number of Canadian residents, and their enthusiasm for our 4th of July Parade (held just after Canada Day on July 1), was refreshing and … adorable.

Once all the floats were decorated, and stocked …

and hitched to whatever was pulling them, if they were being pulled …

and all the last minute costume adjustments made …

it was time to crown Miss Duck Lake!  Maggie Rose took the honors for the 2nd year running.

Our awesome Canadian neighbors, the Shillidays, boast a former Mrs. Calgary in their ranks, and as Royalty we believe that she had the power to so crown Maggie Rose.  That’s Grandpa Shilliday’s rig, above.  So cool.

Quite a crowd gathered at Glacier County Honey World Headquarters in anticipation of the parade.

And when the parking lot was full, Brother Dear busted out his megaphone and got us moving in the right direction.

Once we had a horse and lady up front — that’s Miss Emily Williams, and her trusty steed, Bullet — we were ready to parade!

And away we went, heading south down West Shore Road … pictures of the parade itself to follow!

Marc, thank you.  These pictures are priceless.  If you’re lovin’ ’em, maybe consider making a donation for Marc’s cause?  Here’s the link!

2012.  Glacier County Honey Co.    All photo credits to Marc Ankenbauer.  All Rights Reserved.

 

August 2012 Employee Appreciation Day

Working for Glacier County Honey Co. is not your average employment.  We’ve got no place to put you and we’re going to ask you to work insane hours, 6-7 days per week, in the height of honey season, i.e. right now.  We’ve got one employee — California boy Keith — shacked up in our camper in front of the Warehome, and another — Virginia gentleman Neil — crashed out on the spare bed in our office, when there are a few hours to devote to anything other than working and playing in the Montana sunshine.

Since we’re all piled in on top of each other, working together, eating together, folding laundry together, arguing about Deadliest Catch together, and scraping stingers out of each other’s scalps, Honeydew and I try to hold a few employee appreciation days every summer.  They’re good for everyone’s morale, including ours.

Yesterday was Darling Brother-in-Law’s (DBIL) last night with us — he’s been up here for about 10 days, helping us pull honey, change brake pads, chicken fry elk steaks, and in general, doing what needs to be done.  Honeydew and I are both lucky to have such helpful, wonderful families.  At any rate, we wanted to give DBIL a big send off, and that turned into an Employee Appreciation Day.  We decided to waterski the canal, and enjoy Twistas and steaks at Two Sisters, our go-to favorite near Babb.

Have you ever tried to waterski behind a pickup down a canal?
Because, you know, when living on the border of Glacier National Park in late August, what else does one do after work?

Well, Keith — below — picked it up with no problem, and enjoyed the views of Glacier, to boot!

Honeydew popped off a cheeky wave as he zipped past the cheering section:

DBIL completed the triumphant triumvirate of skiiers:

Pseudo Sista, Brother Dear, Neil, Maggie Rose and I could not be persuaded to try it, but there’s always next time.

Thanks to everyone pulling honey, extracting honey, keeping babies, cooking burgers, and in general make harvest happen for us with enough time for the occasional foray down the canal … we appreciate you!

Not pictured: our awesome parents – Charlie & Nancy Stone; Bob Fullerton; Sarah Evitts – who’ve kept Maggie Rose happy all summer long so that we can work.  THANK YOU!

2012.  Glacier County Honey Co.  All Rights Reserved.

 

fame VIII

As “they” say, it’s amazing what you can learn to do, for love.  Especially since putting my lawyering hat on the shelf with my predictable paychecks, pressed suits and pumps, Glacier County Honey Co. has demanded my education in a number of realms.

When Honeydew and I decided to put on our 1st Annual Fill Your Own Bucket Day, we further decided there was no point in going to all the effort to hook the honey tanks up for a day of retail use unless we went full out and advertised it.  Not paying for advertising meant I had to learn to write a press release, which I did with the help of Western Montana’s Glacier Country’s Tia Troy.  Thanks, Tia!

Photo credit to Patrick Record, Daily Interlake.

That press release lead to another little story about Glacier County Honey, and all that we have learned to do with it and for it.  For love, of course.  Because despite the wake-up-gasping nightmares about honey extracting disasters, uncontrollable weather patterns, and unpredictable bee health, Honeydew and I have never been happier than at the helm of our little bee biz.  As always, thanks to our customers, Facebook friends, Tweeps, and blog readers, for all the support along the way.  Here’s the latest on what the press says about our love affair: Beekeepers Relish Remote Locale for Honey Business / Lynnette Hintze, Daily Interlake.

Photo credit to Patrick Record, Daily Interlake.

2012.  Glacier County Honey Co.  Photo credits to Patrick Record/Daily Interlake.  All Rights Reserved.

 

fame VII

Last fall, Honeydew wound up on the cover the American Bee Journal and I thought I’d never hear the end of it.

Early yesterday morning, my phone started ringing off the hook as friends from the Flathead called to tell me that we were both on the cover of the Flathead Beacon.

I may not be Beekeeper-in-Chief, but I don’t exactly sit around twiddling my thumbs, either, so I’m enjoying the equal fame with Honeydew.  And I have to say that of all the folks who have interviewed us about being young-ish entrepreneurs, I think the Beacon’s Molly Priddy understood us best.  Here’s her article: The Sweet Life.

We appreciate the press, and especially the mention of our 1st Annual Fill Your Own Bucket Day, on August 11.  We hope to see y’all here!

2012.  Glacier County Honey Co.  Photo credit to Lido Vizzutti/Flathead Beacon.  All Rights Reserved.