A Jar Worth Giving — ABJ on the Gift of Honey

This month’s American Bee Journal has a Beekeeping Basics column from Tara Chapman, a fellow Texan who runs Two Hives, and it fits the season just right. She writes about honey as a gift — not just at Christmas, but all over the world and all through history.

Her point is one I agree with. A jar of honey from your own bees isn’t something that gets stuck on a shelf and forgotten. It gets eaten and shared, and it carries a whole year of the bees’ slow, patient work in it. As she puts it, it’s about the opposite of the quick shopping rush that can take over the holidays.

She walks through a few of the old traditions, too. There’s the Honey Full Moon Festival, Madhu Purnima, kept by Buddhists in Bangladesh and Thailand, which remembers a monkey bringing honeycomb to the Buddha in the forest; people still bring honey and fruit to shrines and monasteries on that day. And there’s Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, where apples dipped in honey stand for the hope of a sweet year ahead. The full column goes on to more traditions and some ideas for giving your own honey.

Here in Pearland, November is when the heat finally lets go and the hives settle down for our mild winter. It’s a good time to look at what the bees left you this year. If you pulled honey, set a few small jars aside now for neighbors, the folks who let you keep bees near them, and anybody who helped you in the yard. A plain jar with a handwritten label saying where and when it came from means more than anything fancy. And whatever you give away, make sure the bees kept plenty for themselves first — their winter stores come before our gift list.

Read it from the source: The Gift of Honey All Over the World by Tara Chapman (American Bee Journal, November 2026).

Back in the yard: month-by-month work and the rest of the journal.