Goderich Area Family Wins First Place for Beekeeping at Royal Agricultural Winter Fair

by Bob Montgomery

Goderich area family doctor Stan Spacek says he became interested in beekeeping when he was a young boy living in Europe because his father was a beekeeper.

He says the family moved to Canada when he was twelve and the beekeeping ended. He is now a family doctor in Goderich and one of his patients is a beekeeper who encouraged him to take up beekeeping again. That was six years ago. His own children then became interested in beekeeping. At that time, Brian was seven and Sarah was eleven and they each got a hive and then the parents each got a hive and the family became avid beekeepers. The kids named their brand of honey Our Honey.

Doctor Spacek says there were a few things they had to learn about honey as they went along. One of them was that there is white honey, golden honey, amber honey and dark honey and they assumed theirs was golden honey because it was kind of yellow. So they submitted their honey at the Royal Winter Fair last year as golden honey and were penalized five points out of one hundred because it was in fact white honey, which is the most common kind of honey. Even with the deduction, they ended up with 94.5 points.

This year they submitted their honey in the white honey category and won first place. Doctor Spacek says winning first place was great but the reward for him was being able to introduce his children to something he did as a kid in Europe. He says they've learned something that most young people never experience, the process of raising honey bees, plus the connection with something that he, his father and grandfather did. He says they have a friendly competition each year to decide who's honey gets sent to the Royal Winter Fair and this year that honour went to his fourteen year old son, Brian.