Wild Antho is a family bee farm on Round Prairie Road, just north of Armstrong, BC. Emily Huxter and Shayne Doerksen run it together. They breed queen bees, raise nucleus colonies (nucs), bring hives to farms for pollination, and make raw honey.
Four generations of beekeepers
Emily is at least the fourth generation of her family to keep bees. Her father's family kept hives on their dairy farm in England for as long as anyone can remember. In 1980 her parents, Terry and Liz Huxter, bought a bee farm in Grand Forks, BC. Emily was born that same year.
Liz Huxter became one of the most respected queen breeders in Canada. Emily grew up in her mother's bee yards. Every summer she caught queens and ran grafts, the first step in raising a new queen. She kept at it until she finished university.
Emily then spent 14 years as a hydrologist with Environment Canada, measuring rivers and streams. She and Shayne kept bees on the side the whole time. In 2018 they bought the farm near Armstrong, and Wild Antho ran its first season in 2019.
What Wild Antho does
The farm is built around queens and nucs, with honey on the side. It winters about 900 colonies and runs more than 700 small mating colonies each summer.
- Queen bees. A BC line, mated and marked, shipped across Canada from early May to about mid-August.
- Nucs. Small starter colonies in 4 and 5 frame sizes, picked up at the farm in May.
- Pollination. Hives placed on farms across the Okanagan and Shuswap, starting in April.
- Honey and wax. Raw honey, raw beeswax, and beeswax pillar candles.
Bees bred for Canadian winters
Every Wild Antho queen comes from the line Liz Huxter has selected in Grand Forks for more than 40 years. Emily breeds from her own stock and does not buy in queens. Her bees are raised and wintered in the BC interior, not shipped in from a warmer country.
Emily tests her breeder colonies before she raises queens from them. The test shows how well a colony finds and clears out brood with mites in it. Bees that do this well can keep mites down on their own.
The honey
Wild Antho honey is raw and unpasteurized. The bees make it from the end of May to the middle of August. There are three kinds: wildflower, valley gold, and fireweed. Fireweed depends the most on the weather, so some years bring more of it than others.
Many of the bee yards sit on organic farms across the Okanagan and Shuswap, so the honey tastes of the land it came from. The apiary itself is not certified organic.
