Following in the traditions of many monasteries in Russia, our Brotherhood keeps beehives and produces our own honey. The bees live deep in the forests surrounding the Monastery and feed off the wildflowers of the beautiful southern Cascade Mountains.
Several times a year our bees fill their hives with sweet honeycomb, and the honey harvest begins. The monks take each frame of the honeycomb from the hives and use a manual machine almost 100 years old to extract the honey from the wax. The honey undergoes no other processing or adulteration. It is a raw, natural, organic product.
Though a time-consuming and arduous process that includes some danger of bee stings, the result that emerges is a nutritious, sweet, deep-flavored honey that is so hard to find in our over-processed age of commercialization. And, as with all monastic work, the production of our honey is undertaken with prayer and humble obedience, which only adds to its sweetness.
