Honeybee Wallpapers

Download our free honeybee-themed screen savers

Looking for a fresh new background for your phone? Maybe a new screen saver for your desktop computer? We got you covered!

Click below to download your favorite. Or, try all four!

Honey Watermelon Smoothie

Ingredients

1 cup ripe seedless watermelon

1 cup of ice

1/2 cup milk

2 tbsp SUE BEE® honey

1/2 greek yogurt – any flavor

Directions

Place all ingredients in blender and mix until smooth. Perfect for breakfast, lunch or a refreshing snack! Additional add-ins for extra protein: almond butter or vanilla protein powder.

Summer Snack Time

Snacks are in high demand in the summertime. Kids are home from school. The days are longer. And all those outdoor activities makes us hungry!

No need to panic, though – we have you covered. Here are three new snack recipes that are perfect for summertime tummy rumbles:

Honey Apple Nachos

Click HERE to view the recipe for these delicious apple bites.

Honey Yogurt Bark

Click HERE to get the recipe for our honey-kissed yogurt bark.

Honey Apple Energy Bites

Click HERE to see the recipe for our Honey Apple Energy Bites.

Honey Apple Energy Bites

Ingredients

2 cups old-fashioned oats

1 small package of Bare Baked Crunchy Cinnamon Apple chips

1/2 cup SUE BEE® honey

1 cup almond butter

1/2 cup coconut

1/2 tsp cinnamon

Directions

Pour oats into bowl. Place about half a bag of apple chips into plastic bag. Seal bag and then crush with hand or mallet. Pour crushed chips into bowl with oats. Add coconut and cinnamon. Mix well. Add almond butter and honey, stir well and form into 2-inch balls. Store in an air tight container and keep in refrigerator. Enjoy as snacks or breakfast on the go!

Keep Your Busy Bees Busy

Download and print our activity sheets!

Did you know hummingbirds, bats, bees, butterflies and beetles are ALL pollinators?! Insects, even the ones that aren’t pollinators, are important, too! For Insect Week and National Pollinators Week, we created a series of insect-related activities, including a maze and color-by-number worksheet so your kiddos can join in on the fun!

Click here to download the printable versions of the
activity sheets!

Slow-cooker Honey Chipotle Tacos

Ingredients

1 1/2 lbs. of boneless chicken breasts

1/3 cup SUE BEE® honey

1 packet of taco seasoning

2 chipotle peppers, from a can, packed in adobo sauce

1 tablespoon of adobo sauce

1/2 cup chicken stock or light beer

1 lime

Extra toppings: avocados, sour cream, red onions, shredded cheese, lettuce, tomato

Tortillas

Directions

Spray slow-cooker with non-stick cooking spray. Pour in chicken stock or beer. Place in chicken and add seasoning, peppers and adobo sauce. Squeeze juice from lime over all ingredients. Mix well. Turn slow-cooker on low for 8 hours or high for 4 hours. Serve immediately with tortillas and any toppings you desire!

Honey & Fruit Pastries

Ingredients

1 package of puff pastry dough

Pears, Apples or Nectarines – sliced thin

SUE BEE® honey

Powdered sugar

1 egg (for egg wash)

Directions

Heat the oven to 425 degrees. Place parchment paper on baking sheet. Pour quarter-sized portions of honey in four areas on baking sheet. Layer 3-4 slices of desired fruit on top of honey. Drizzle honey over fruit. Lay 4″ x 4″ squares of puff pastry on top of fruit.  Brush pastry dough with egg wash or butter. Bake for 12-15 mins. Sprinkle with powdered sugar and drizzle with honey. Serve immediately.

Bee’s Knees Cocktail is Back!

By the way, do honeybees even have knees?

“Bee’s knees” – a famous cocktail, or a nice way to give a compliment? It’s both. And sometimes, you might even say, “This Bee’s Knees cocktail sure is the bee’s knees.”

Serendipitously, the two meanings of “bee’s knees” entered the English dialogue around the same time – in the 1920s. On one wing, “bee’s knees” is believed to have originated from the phrase “bee’s knees and cat’s whiskers,” which was a term used in the 1920s to refer to something that was considered excellent or top-notch.

On the other wing, “bee’s knees” also was used as the name of a cocktail that was popular during the 1920s Prohibition era, when people used ingredients like honey and lemon to tame the unpleasant taste of the moonshine gin that was available at the time. The original recipe was a simple concoction that called for gin, honey and lemon juice – honey to sweeten and lemon juice for a tart flavor – to balance the harsh taste of the gin.

After Prohibition ended in 1933, the Bee’s Knees drink lost favor as new and higher-quality (legal) liquors were made available. However, in recent years, classic cocktails and craft cocktails have become all the rage, and the Bee’s Knees is popular again. Helping fuel the resurgence is a trend toward natural ingredients. Honey, in particular, has become a popular ingredient in cocktails due to its unique flavor profile and what many believe to be health benefits.

Honey is a natural sweetener that is rich in antioxidants and has antibacterial properties. It is also a versatile ingredient that can be used in a variety of cocktails. When used in the Bee’s Knees, the honey adds a subtle sweetness that pairs well with the tartness of the lemon juice and the gin. It’s a winning combo that has led several widely known New York restaurants to currently feature the drink on their menus. The Bee’s Knees is once again the bee’s knees!

Want to try one? The mix is simple

Ingredients

2 oz gin

3/4 oz lemon juice (preferably freshly squeezed)

1/2 oz SUE BEE® honey

Lemon twist for garnish

Directions: Just add the ingredients in a shaker and shake well. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass and garnish with the lemon twist. Cheers!

About those knees …

All this talk about bee’s knees got us thinking … do honeybees actually have knees?

Contrary to what the name may suggest, bees do not have knees. Insects have jointed legs, and the segments of their legs are called coxae, trochanter, femur, tibia and tarsus. These segments provide flexibility and allow bees to move their legs in different directions, but they do not have a knee joint like humans do, says Jürgen Tautz in his book, “The Buzz About Bees.” 

Tautz explains that the joint between the tibia and femur is commonly referred to as the bee’s knee, but it is not a true knee joint like those found in humans or other animals because it doesn’t have a patella and fibula that form the hinge joint. 

The more you know …

Bee’s Knees Cocktail

Ingredients

2 oz gin

3/4 oz lemon juice (preferably freshly squeezed)

1/2 oz SUE BEE® honey

Lemon twist for garnish

Directions

Just add the ingredients in a shaker and shake well. Strain into a chilled cocktail glass and garnish with the lemon twist. Cheers!

Irish Honey Julep

Ingredients

1 tbsp SUE BEE® Honey

1.5 oz whiskey

1 Kiwi

1 cucumber

8 leaves mint

3 oz lime juice

1 oz tonic water

Directions

SUE BEE® Hot Hot Toddy

Curling up with a toasty-warm drink on a cold winter evening is a traditional nightcap for many. A hot toddy recipe – or, as some spell it, “hot tottie” or “hot toddie” – is simple: a little whiskey or brandy, a few spices, some hot water, and voilà! A hot toddy! And, of course, we always add a teaspoon of SUE BEE® honey to ours!

The origins of the hot toddy are blurry – kind of like your vision if you enjoy too many in one sitting – but they are often traced back to Ireland or Scotland, circa 18th century. Others trace the origins to British-controlled India during the same period. (And here we thought it was just a concoction our grandparents invented!)

Wherever they began, the hot toddy was – and still is – frequently used as a solution for colds to soothe a sore throat and relieve congestion. In fact, the hot toddy is so popular these days that it has taken on the role of chicken soup for adults. Feeling achy? Stuffed nose? Try a hot toddy. There’s even a chicken soup hot toddymade with chicken stock!

The word “toddy” is just as much a mystery as the origins of the drink. One belief is that it comes from the Hindi word “tari,” which refers to a type of palm sap that is fermented and used to make a sweet drink. That sweet drink was popular in India and Southeast Asia and, over time, became popular in other parts of the world, particularly in the Caribbean where it was made from other ingredients such as rum and honey. In the Caribbean, it is an especially popular drink during the holiday season and is usually served warm with spices such as nutmeg or cinnamon.

Of course, like many things, as time went on, the hot toddy evolved and has now become a popular anytime drink, especially for someone fighting a cold. And it’s still evolving today. Take our new toddy twist – the SUE BEE® INFUSIONS™ Hot Hot Honey Toddy. We’ve taken the traditional hot toddy and mixed in a half-ounce of our new zesty and sweet honey. It’s a sweet-and-spicy heat that turns that hot toddy on its ear. Want to try one? Here’s the recipe:

Ingredients

• 2 oz whiskey, rum or bourbon
• 1/2 oz SUE BEE® INFUSIONS™ Hot Honey
• 1 tsp of fresh lemon juice
• 1/2 cup hot water
• Cinnamon stick

Directions

In a teapot, bring the water to a simmer. Pour the hot water into a mug.

Add the whiskey, rum or bourbon, ½ ounce of honey and lemon juice. 

Stir until the honey has blended the hot water.

Taste, and add more honey more sweetness.

Garnish with a cinnamon stick.

Enjoy!

Hired Wings

Almonds rule, but that’s not all honeybees are recruited to pollinate

When almond pollination season – mid-February to mid-March – rolls around each year, it means that, like many commercial beekeepers in the U.S., the Sioux Honey Co-op’s 200+ beekeepers have taken their honeybees to California to help with the state’s $8 billion almond industry.

How many honeybees? According to the USDA’s latest report, almond farmers paid to have 1,032,700 acres of almonds pollinated by honeybees in 2022. To pollinate that many acres, almond farmers needed about 1.88 million colonies of honeybees – about two hives per acre. With an average of about 40,000 honeybees per colony, that’s roughly 75.2 billion honeybees.

So … A LOT OF HONEYBEES!

Not just almonds

You might have heard an often-used phrase: Honeybees are responsible for pollinating one in every three bites of food. It’s hard to measure the accuracy of that but, in theory, it’s factual. Consider: We rely on honeybees and other pollinators to pollinate 71 of the 100 crops that provide 90% of the world’s food.

While almonds get the majority of honeybee pollination services (for our almond milk, almond butter, almond flour and other favorites), there are dozens of other fruits and vegetables that our beloved black-and-yellow insects pollinate – either naturally or as hired hands … err, wings. In fact, while other insects, like butterflies, provide pollination services, it’s the honeybee that pollinates the most foods we consume – more than 130 different fruits and vegetables. In the U.S. alone, honeybees pollinate an estimated $15 billion worth of crops every year.

Among the foods honeybees pollinate: apples, pumpkins, blueberries, cucumbers, onions, avocados, cherries, broccoli, cranberries, grapes, lettuce, strawberries, watermelon, and on and on.

Love coffee? Thank the honeybees for that; they pollinate the coffee cherry, which is a fruit, and the coffee bean itself is a part of the fruit. 

More on those pollination numbers

While the fruits and veggies on the rest of the list don’t match the million+ acres of almonds pollinated each year, honeybees do cover a lot of ground when it comes to paid pollination services. 

Apple farmers, for example, paid for about 120,700 honeybee hives to pollinate about 133,400 acres of apples in 2022. Blueberry farmers leased about 101,500 hives to pollinate about 39,900 acres during the same time. And cherry farmers employed about 134,300 colonies (about 5.3 billion honeybees) to pollinate 68,910 acres of cherries.

All of which means, if we could hug a honeybee, we would. Each and every one of them! It also means, we need to continue to do all we can to help the honeybee thrive. In recent years, the honeybee’s global population has been diminished by things like the decrease in forgeable land due to monoculture farming, the relentless varroa mites, and mysterious, hard-to-pinpoint reasons that often fall under the label of “colony collapse disorder,” where entire colonies disappear overnight.

Sioux Honey beekeepers – along with other commercial beekeepers – have been keeping up with the losses by helping create new hives through the “splitting” of healthy hives. Beekeepers take a portion of an established colony and transfer it to a separate hive nearby and, thus, create two colonies from one. So, while we’re handing out hugs, let’s pass a few along to our Sioux Honey Co-op beekeepers for doing their part to ensure the sustainability of the honeybee.