Beepeeking With Negar Mirsalehi: The New Mirsalehi Bee Garden

Beepeeking at Gisou is all about giving you, our community, a peek inside the world of bees & beekeeping. As our Beekeeper-In-Chief, Negar Mirsalehi is excited to bring you along throughout the bee season!

“This bee season 2023, we have re-designed the Gisou Bees Project. With this project, we show our support of beekeeping efforts through several initiatives such as cultivating bee gardens, collaborating with charities that promote like minded objectives, spreading education about the bees through workshops and online with our Bee Learning course, and gifting wildflower seeds that support bees on special occasions throughout the year. This is a special Gisou initiative in support of beekeeping practices and bee welfare to fight the declining bee population worldwide.”

Cultivating our new bee garden

This bee season, we have worked on one of our biggest initiatives: we cultivated our newest Mirsalehi bee garden, not far from our original bee garden. With this bee garden we continue our commitment to sustainably-sourced honey. We put the wellbeing of our honey bees first in everything we do. This new garden is also used for educational purposes, events and training opportunities such as workshops for those interested in learning about beekeeping practices.

We scouted a wonderful location where our bees can live, forage and thrive under the best circumstances. We planted many nectar- and pollen bearing trees, plants, flowers for our honey bees and all other pollinators in the area. We have a wonderful mix of floral sources such as our original thistle, white clover, fireweed and hogweed as well as new floral sources to make our new bee garden a rich source of nectar and pollen during the entire bee season, such as echinacea in several colors and much more! 

Our new bee barns and hives are now the home of our honey bees and they are thriving this summer! We started by introducing three colonies at a time by moving new colonies from the original garden to the new bee garden. This is done slowly so as to not disturb the honey bees and to allow them to slowly adapt to the new environment they are introduced in. 

Growing new colonies

Once we moved the new colonies our goal was to grow the colonies this summer and of course to prevent swarming in the swarming season. We now have strong colonies in our new garden that forage for nectar and pollen. The bees have produced nice batches of honey and harvesting month is around the corner where we will only take the surplus of honey. It’s amazing to witness our honey bees adapting to their new garden and seeing our garden evolve day by day. 

Learn more about honey bees

Find out more about honey bees and their colonies and start The Gisou Bee Learning Course. This is a comprehensive and educational step-by-step program that supports our core mission — to raise awareness around the importance of bees and inspire a new generation of beekeepers — and is for anyone who takes an interest in bees and understands their importance as well as the crucial role a beekeeper plays  in the colony’s health and survival.

Throughout the program - which is offered for free - you will learn the (beekeeping) ropes which you can test by taking a quiz at the end of each class and see how much you’ve learned! The new and improved bee learning course covers topics such as the importance of the bees, bee basics, beekeeping 101, bee products and how to harvest honey.

Stay tuned for our next steps into Autumn!