We have kept honey bees on the farm for several years, we first tried the natural approach and eventually ended up with no bees. Unfortunately this is a familiar story for many beekeepers.
In April of this year we purchased two packages of bees, with southern Italian queens, from Walter Kelly / Mann Lake in Clarkson, KY. The bees have been doing very well, and this year has been good in terms of nectar flow and pollen for our area according to local beekeepers.
We are learning more about beekeeping, and part of this education is online and from youtube.
I have watched several youtube videos from Bob Binnie, he runs Blue Ridge Honey Company in northeast Georgia. Here are links to a couple of his videos regarding sourwood honey and sourwood trees:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puBmwJ69nWY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEkJmvutinw
Wikipedia link with a map showing the natural range of sourwood trees:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxydendrum
Sourwood honey is considered by some to be one of the best types of honey in the world.
I am familiar with many types of trees, but not the sourwood tree. I started to learn about sourwood trees, and I have been looking around for several weeks hoping to see a sourwood tree. Yesterday morning I noticed that some white flowers had appeared on a tree about 100 feet from our house, in between the house and the barn, at the edge of the woods, with southern exposure. I grabbed the binoculars and saw that the leaves and flowers matched perfectly with the information I had looked at for sourwood! The white flowers were shaped like miniature bells, hanging down in a row from drooping stems. This was exciting and unexpected, we have lived on the farm for more than 10 years and I never knew that we had sourwood trees here, or that I would be interested in them because of honey bees.
This particular sourwood tree is sandwiched in between several other trees, it is behind and above a sassafras tree that we put a rope ladder in many years ago, with black cherry and oak trees behind and beside and above the sourwood tree.
I went on a sourwood spotting hike, with pups and meows joining me, carrying a camera, binoculars, flagging tape, and white tree marking paint. I found a few sourwood trees in the opening at the bottom of the driveway, and then more along the edge of the woods from the barn to where the bee hives are located, pictures below were taken yesterday July 1 on the farm. I also saw a patch of sourwood trees on the south facing hillside across the road from our farm.
Sourwood trees like full to partial sun, the trees are medium sized, they lean and are not straight, and the bark is deep and divided into rectangles.
I chewed a couple of leaves from different sourwood trees and it does indeed have a very nice sour taste.
I checked on the ground below a couple of sourwood trees and found some fallen sourwood seed pods still attached to the stems, the opened seed pods were split into 5 pieces. I believe I found some young sourwood trees, and I will try to learn about propagating or growing sourwood trees.
I plan to do some work around a few of the sourwood trees I marked to remove a bit of competition and provide them with slightly more favorable conditions.
This weekend I will continue to look around and see if I can find more sourwood trees on the farm, I now know the types of places it will grow and it is easy to spot at this time while it is in bloom.
The sourwood is blooming here at just about the same time that some of the blackberries are ready to be picked.
