Gracie McTaggart first learned about bees and honey two years ago at a 4-H Club meeting in Fairhope. She learned how to harvest honey with her friend, Evan, and his father, Dr. Michael Pursley, a cardiologist from Fairhope who learned how to harvest honey from his father. Uncle Daddy Michael, as Gracie calls him, had hives on the roof of his medical practice building near Thomas Hospital. He later moved the hives to Allegri Farms in Daphne, Alabama. 

There, Gracie and Evan have eight hives and harvest local honey twice a year. Local honey has many healing properties such as soothing sore throats and reducing the lifespan of a head cold. It’s a natural antiseptic and helps tame the stomach flu. My primary interest was to get help with seasonal allergies and I bet I’m not alone. 

A seasoned veteran, Gracie, now 12 years old, takes her hobby seriously. She visits the hives every month to tend to them. Honey is harvested twice a year, in winter and summer. Winter honey is darker because the plants the bees pollinate are darker. Summer honey is lighter because the plants are brighter. Local honey’s benefits come from the bees busying themselves with exactly the same plants that are causing your allergies to flare up. Makes sense.

Harvesting honey is an interesting process. First you blow the bees from the hives in order to transport the hives to where you are going to extract the honey. The extraction starts by scraping the caps off the honeycombs to open them. The combs are then spun to remove the honey and then it is processed through a mesh filter into a 5-gallon bucket. The buckets have a spout at the bottom with a nozzle used to fill the jars. Eight hives yields about 75 8oz. bottles of honey. 

Bees are critical to grow crops and flowers anywhere and everywhere, but Gracie and her mom, Katherine, noticed that the crops on Allegri Farms seemed to be bigger, brighter, and healthier than what they had seen in other places. Must be those hard-working bees that live on the farm.  

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