Our Story

Andrew and I (Angela) were city kids. Growing up, I had zero experience with farming, with the exception of our annual school trip to the local petting farm (didn't like it). Meanwhile, Andrew's dad would take him for a week or two every summer to Andrew's grandparents' honey farm outside of Saskatoon, helping bring in the honey harvest. It was hot, sticky, backbreaking work, and he was always getting stung. He was not a huge fan of beekeeping during his childhood.

Many years later, after we had met, we decided to move to Saskatoon together for work and school. In our first year, we went back to the farm to help Andrew's grandpa work with the bees for one full season, from start to finish.

During that season, we saw the bees first emerge from their winter sabbatical, we supported their spring growth as the hives feasted on flowering wildflowers and crops, we raised queen bees, we endured the hot summer days of lifting heavy honey boxes, and we carried out the fall work of ensuring every hive was healthy and well-fed for winter.

Experiencing in real time the connection between these honeybees and the Earth in ways that we never paid attention to before, we began to understand the way that weather, moisture, sunshine, flowers, other animals, and the changing seasons all interacted together to impact the food that the honeybees were creating.

Growing up in an environment where we don't think about how our food is made, or how it gets to our homes, beekeeping opened our eyes and made us realize how we took for granted the ways that our collective food is farmed, processed, and distributed.

More importantly, we saw the ways that our food system wasn't serving us well and how we could help people get back to filling their diets with wholesome, nutritionally dense, minimally processed foods.

Quickly, Andrew fell in love with the bees. I fell in love with the journey of how our food gets from the land and sky, to our kitchen tables.

From there, Andrew devoted himself to the goal of raising healthy, sustainable honeybees, and continuing on the craft that his grandfather first took up in the 1970s. A few years later I joined him full-time to help share the nourishing, nutritious honey that these bees were creating.

About Us

Three Foragers is based in the wide open prairies surrounding Saskatoon, Saskatchewan and the rich forests in the Cowichan Valley of Vancouver Island, BC. Our family and team are the backbone of our small but mighty farm. Before bees, Angela was a neuroscience graduate and research admin, and Andrew was a graduate in horticulture science.

We still get hot, sticky, and very often stung - but we love what we do and are grateful to share it with you.

If you would like to know more about how we keep bees or would like to be a beekeeper yourself please check our sister site: www.canadianbeesandqueens.ca