Beekeeper Kavita Bay cracks open the lid of one of the dozens of hives on her property in Alberton. The bees buzz happily around her head.
“There are some bees, and you can see them crawling around those frames. You see all that white wax, that means there’s really something around that’s blooming, and they’re making wax and putting honey in there,” Bay says.
She’s wearing the top half of a bee suit, but also casually strolling in flip-flops. She smiles and says when it’s warm and the flowers are blooming, bees are too content to worry about stinging.
“Bees can have their moods. If it's cold and rainy, they're not happy,” Bay says.
“What are their favorite conditions?” Juhlin says.
“Right now, like when things are blooming, and it's hot and sunny,” Bay says.
She moves through the boxes in a meditative state, carefully prying off lids to check on different hives. This area’s like bee ICU - where they bring the troubled hives to monitor them. So far, it looks like that extra care is paying off.
“When you see white wax that makes you happy like okay this hive’s doing pretty good,” Bay says.
Bay co-owns Hindu Hillbilly Honey with her husband. They run around 800 hives spanning from St. Regis to Missoula. In addition to plain and flavored honeys, Bay makes elixirs, skincare products, wax luminaries and soaps - all infused with herbs she grows or forages. Glass bottles of spices and jars filled with flowers suspended in oils cover her workshop’s shelves like an apothecary.
“I really love that I don't ever really have the same day, day after day, and that we get to live by the seasons, and so that just rhythmic quality of being in agriculture,” Bay says.
Their business is featured on the cover of this year’s fourth annual Local Food Guide.
Bay says it’s hard being a small family run business - especially when things really do depend on the weather. But having the support of the local community keeps her doing what she loves.
“And creating a relationship with the people that are buying food from you, I think that's really, really important,” Bay says.
Bay relies on word of mouth, and a presence at local events like Missoula’s farmers market to build her customer base. She said it’s taken time, and she’s always looking for more ways to get the word out, and connect with customers.
In the 1950s, 70% of the food on Montanan’s plates was grown or raised in the state. Nowadays, that number has shrunk to 3%.
But the risks of relying on a global food system became apparent during the pandemic as stores struggled to stock shelves. Sammie McGowan is with local nonprofit Abundant Montana.
“We saw how easily it was for our national and global supply chain to break and to leave us foodless, which is very concerning for a state like Montana that produces quite a bit of food,” McGowan says.
McGowan says a lack of awareness is the biggest challenge in eating locally. She helped put together the Local Food Guide which aims to fix that problem.
“We wanted to be like an evergreen magazine that people could hold on to all year, to look for, through the regional listings, as well as using the recipes and the seasonality guide,” McGowan says.
McGowan says eating local is better for consumers, since food is picked at peak freshness, and better for producers, like Hindu Hillbilly Honey
“Farmers selling locally keep 60 cents of every dollar that is bought in state, as opposed to about only 14 to 17 cents if they are selling out of state,” McGowan says.
Montana has a short growing season, with only about 130 frost-free growing days on average. That narrow window can lead many people to think there’s not much produced here beyond beef and grain. But McGowan says that couldn’t be further from the truth.
“Montana is this, like unicorn of a state where, honestly, like, we can pretty much grow everything we need,” McGowan says.
She hopes the local food guide helps demonstrate that.
