Wild Beekeeper
My name is Mark van Dam. Bee keeping has been my passion for 20 years. I would like to introduce to you a health product I have been working on for ten years. It’s mainly the pure, natural, raw, untreated, non-heated, non-filtered and non-strained honey from my West Cork apiaries with sun soaked pollen and propolis from Guadalahara, spain.
Bees have been around for over 30 million years!
Us humans are destroying their habitat. Without our pollinators, natural crops will not grow.
At Mark’s Farm we work with our bees, animals and plants as naturally as possible. Chemical sprays and pharmaceutical medicine are not used. Instead we use herbs, oils, homeopathy, and switching pastures (rotation) regularly to look after our stock and vegetables.
Natural farming methods like permaculture, biodynamics and companionship planting are used. We don’t use store bought nitrogen fertilizer and instead create our own mix of fertilizer with Russian comfrey, manure and seaweed.
All of these methods are tried and tested and tinkered with until they make a difference. The idea being, that our stocks are healthy and become more resistant to illness and don’t suffer from over-farming.
We fully understand the need for commercial farming and the pressures supermarkets put on farmers because we all want food cheaper. We simply chose to not have lots of stuff for ourselves and have less product, but the feelings good, because we feel we are doing our bit to work with nature rather than exploit her to the max.
How our natural honey mix was discovered
Years ago a neighbour requested removal of a swarm that had been living in their roof for many years. After scooping out the wax, pollen and honey and then cold filtering it, we thought the taste of the mix was ambrosial!
That’s when we decided to create our own “wild honey”, a mixture of our honey with pollen and propolis.
Our bees are kept biodynamically
That means we manipulate them when the stars are in optimum position, astrologically.
It also means we live and work with their natural ways as much as possible.
When our bees need help with beeing healthy, just like all other living creatures, we use natural medicine to help them get well. For instance, if there is a varroa mite infestation, a mix of formic acid, which occurs naturally in ants, and oxalates, also known as oxalic acid, a naturally-occurring compound in plants, is used to lower the infestation rate.
