Learn More: Reed Channel Farm's plantings for Healthy Bees

Reed Channel Farm’s plants a lavender field for healthy bees.

We often hear of the trouble with honey bees and colony collapse.  Very often a common colony stressor is the varroa mite (Varroa destructor) and the viruses it can transmit. This parasitic mites suck the blood from both the adults and developing brood, especially drone pupae.  It is something that we see frequently in our hives. Lavender has special qualities that help the bees rid themselves of this nuisance pest.  We planted the lavender field in the summer of 2016 and were so please to find that our hives had essentially no mites at all. In addition to helping our honey bees we found that there were many other native pollinators who found their way to our lavender field providing a healthy foraging habitat for many other insect species.  We now have lovely fragrant dried lavender and sachets made from local lavender.