Edible Ottawa

For the Love of Bees

• Photo by Amy Zambonin

• Brian Lacey, top, moved to Ottawa in 2015, bringing 80 hives with him from Guelph, where he studied ecology and worked in the University of Guelph's bee and botany labs. He now keeps 180 colonies all over the region, sells Blue Shoes Honey at the Westboro, Lansdowne and ByWard markets, offers workshops, breeds queens and is starting to make mead.

• Since he turned 40, Lacey jokes that his eyesight isn’t up to the job any longer, so his colleague, Charlotte Doyle, top, has mostly taken over the queen-bee propagation. Doyle, although new to beekeeping in the spring of 2019, “is really, really good at this,” Lacey says. “She has a very high success rate.”