Eleven Bees

Great Market this morning Shire To Shore Community Market - one more Saturday left for me 🥲

Thinking of moving to Nova Scotia? Check out this opportunity to be up and running

We’re Hiring – Kitchen Team Member with Room to Grow!

In just two weeks we’ll be losing another cook, leaving Cary as the only person in the kitchen while also managing the day-to-day operations of Cast Away Cafe, booking and organizing events, handling marketing, and running sound for our live music.

We’re looking for someone who wants more than just a job we’re looking for someone who wants to grow with us.

No experience? That’s okay.

If you have a passion for food, enjoy cooking at home, have a positive attitude, and can stay calm during busy times, we’ll teach you everything you need to know. We’re looking for the right person, not just the right résumé.

The position includes:
• Preparing breakfast, lunch or dinner service
• Learning our menu while bringing new ideas for specials and future menu items
• Helping manage inventory and food ordering
• Keeping the kitchen clean, organized and operating efficiently
• Working closely with the rest of our team to provide a great customer experience

Our goal is to train the right person to eventually become Kitchen Manager and take ownership of the day-to-day operation of the kitchen.

What we offer:
• Starting training wage of $18/hour
• Wage increase once training is successfully completed
• We pay for all required Food Safety certification
• Full-time hours during our busy season (June–September)
• Winter hours are lighter, with 1–2 days per week plus special events
• Staff discounts
• Free meals and drinks while working
• An incredible waterfront workplace
• A supportive team that genuinely enjoys working together

We’re looking for someone who:
• Has a passion for food and enjoys cooking
• Is dependable, hardworking and eager to learn
• Can stay organized during busy service
• Enjoys meeting and talking with people
• Is willing to help wherever needed
• Wants to build a long-term career with us

One thing we’re especially proud of is our team. Most of our staff have been with us since we opened or are approaching two years with us. We’ve built a workplace where people support one another, work hard, and have fun doing it.

If this sounds like you—or someone you know—we’d love to hear from you.

Send us a message, drop off a résumé at the café. Even if you’ve never worked in a commercial kitchen before, don’t let that stop you from applying. If you’ve got the right attitude, we’ll teach you the rest.

And if you could share this post, we’d really appreciate it. The right person might be someone in your network.

Shire to Shore Market 11-2 Guysborough Waterfront- beauty day! Aug 2nd

Happy World Bee Day! I am wilding my yard one step at a time. I have added plants that are native to Ontario and attract pollinators and I don't cut my lawn full of dandelions until it the very last.

Here is a great way to support bees and help identify how healthy the population is in your area - get the kids involved

Bumble Bee Sightings - Bumble Bee Watch Bumble Bee Watch is a community science project through the partnership of The Xerces Society, the University of Ottawa, Wildlife Preservation Canada, BeeSpotter, The Natural History Museum, London, and the Montreal Insectarium.

hey ottawa!

have you been to this sweet little gem of a market? The Greely Good Market at 5770 Bank Street?

greely good is tucked away just south of the city on bank street in the village of greely.

A place to meet up with friends, grab a coffee + lunch + dinner to go . pick up your bread, thrift a fit, check out local makers, get some fresh veggies and a bouquet of fresh blooms.

We are a community of resident + pop-up local vendors.

it's a greely good time.
open sundays from 10 til 3,

Eleven Bees will be there - Booth 9 or so they tell me :)

Home | Greely Good Market

Wow Just Wow - https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1EMyoXpDHt/

Not a single bee was harmed to make it.
Her name is Luci Jockel. She is an American jewelry and metalsmithing artist based in Philadelphia, and what she created is one of the most extraordinary works of art you have probably never heard of.
It is called the Gold Veil.
The idea began when Jockel was studying mourning attire at the RISD Museum and came across something quiet and heartbreaking — workers cleaning a dead colony of honey bees from the museum's roof. The bees had not survived the winter. Jockel looked at those wings and saw something other people had swept away as waste.
She saw a way to honor them.
She reached out to beekeepers asking a simple question — had they lost their hives? One beekeeper, Paul Whewell, had lost his entire colony to a particularly harsh winter. He gave Jockel the wings. In return, she gave him her labor, helping him rebuild his colony from scratch. Through that exchange, she learned sustainable beekeeping from the inside — and continued it at home with her own father's hives.
She also collected wings from hives on the rooftops of the MAD Museum and the Brooklyn Museum in New York, tended by beekeeper Bruce Gifford. Bees across all these hives had perished from cold weather, mites, pesticides, and other natural causes. Every wing came from a bee that had already died. No bee was ever harmed for the sake of the art.
Then came the work itself.
Wing by wing. Archival glue. Patience measured in months. 20,000 wings in total, arranged with the precision and care of lace-making, building a veil long enough to drape over a human figure.
But Jockel did not do it alone. Reflecting the very nature of what she was honoring, she assembled a human "hive" — family members and friends working together — to help construct the Gold Veil. Just as a real bee colony depends on the cooperation of thousands of workers, so did the piece. That detail alone transforms the veil from a beautiful object into a living idea.
The result is breathtaking. The wings catch light the way gold does, translucent and shimmering, delicate enough to seem impossible. It looks as though it should not exist. That is the point.
The Gold Veil is a ceremony of mourning and a call for attention at the same time. Honey bees pollinate 85% of all vegetation on Earth. They are not just insects. They are infrastructure. Without them, the food systems that billions of people depend on begin to collapse. And yet 42% of bee colonies in the United States alone collapsed in a single recent year — lost to pesticides, parasites, habitat loss, and changing weather.
Jockel's work places that loss directly in front of you, in the most intimate way possible — wearing it.
Her art is recognized at the highest levels. She holds an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, was shortlisted for the American Craft Council Emerging Voices Award in 2019, and has been featured in Metalsmith Magazine and American Craft Magazine. The Smithsonian American Art Museum recognizes her work, and her pieces are held in collections including the RISD Museum and galleries in New Jersey and the Netherlands. She currently teaches Metalsmithing and Jewelry at Towson University, where she continues to shape how the next generation of artists thinks about materials, ethics, and the natural world.
What Luci Jockel built is not just a veil made of wings. It is a question worn on the body.
How much have we already lost without noticing? And what does it cost to pay attention before it is too late?

~Weird Wonders and Facts

Eleven Bees Chaga is wild harvested in Northern Ontario by myself and in Northern Quebec by a naturalist.

I have begun GPS marking every tree I wild harvest, so I know exactly how each tree is doing year to year.

Chaga Studies continue to document the impact of Chaga as a natural healer.

Check out a couple of studies on the Eleven Bees website and learn more about this powerful natural healer.

eleven-bees.square.site

Merry Christmas - may this be a restful, blessed time for all.

Birch trees, the medicine

Ecologist Suzanne Simard has changed how we see forests.

In the 1990s, Simard was studying Canadian forests when she noticed something strange: when loggers removed birch trees to help Douglas firs grow, the firs didn’t thrive. In fact, they struggled. Curious, she began tracing where nutrients were going — and what she found overturned a century of forest science.

Using radioactive carbon tracing, Simard showed that trees were sharing nutrients underground — not just within a species, but across species. Birch trees were passing carbon to fir trees through networks of mycorrhizal fungi — microscopic threads that connect tree roots. These fungal networks form a vast, hidden web beneath the forest floor, linking trees in systems that act less like individuals and more like communities.

She found that older, larger trees — often birches — served as central hubs, redistributing resources and stabilizing the ecosystem. When these trees were removed, the entire network weakened. Forests didn’t just lose biomass — they lost connection.

Simard’s discovery challenged the long-held view of forests as places of fierce competition. Instead, she revealed a system based on cooperation, signaling, and mutual support — a living network where trees share water, nitrogen, carbon, and even warning signals about pests and drought.

Her research reshaped forestry, conservation, and our understanding of how nature works: not as a fight for survival, but as a web of interdependence — mostly hidden beneath our feet.

To learn more, read Simard’s book:
"Finding the Mother Tree." Knopf, 2021.

Fun wee Christmas market at Irene’s Pub 2-5 613 Merch