Just because people say it’s an old wives’ tale doesn’t mean it isn’t true

Just because people say it’s an old wives tale, doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Since discovering Honeycomb Heroes at the Tackett’s Mill Farmer Market, local resident Tye Johnson has been stocking up on local honey to “treat” her young daughter’s allergies.

“The pollen in local honey helps with local allergies,” she said. “My grandmother taught me that.”

Johnson, who moved to the area from Alabama, said her daughter had suffered severely from allergies.

“She even missed a couple of days of school,” she said. “Now I give her one teaspoon of local honey every day and even her doctor has commented on the improvement,” Johnson said.

Local honey, in this case, means honey produced at Honeycomb Heroes’ Stafford location from beehives there. The company, which also sells its products online and at other farmer’s markets around Northern Virginia, offers several additional flavors of natural honey, along with products made from beeswax, like skin cream, lip balm and deodorant.

To produce Shenandoah Apple Honey, said Alex Pedraza, who manned the booth on a recent Tuesday evening, hives are loaded into the back of a pickup truck and relocated to the Shenandoah Valley and Florida where the bees produce apple and citrus flavored honeys while pollinating those crops. Then they are brought back to Stafford, where they are processed, but ever so slightly.

Each hive has a couple of different “slats,” Pedraza said, explaining that the beekeepers, dressed in bee suits just like you see on television, extract the honey-laden slats and allow them to drip into barrels.

“We heat the barrels to make sure [the honey] is all fluid, but we never boil it. It’s raw, pure honey,” he said.

Honeycomb Heroes was founded in 2012 by Jimmy (Jimmy Mac) McWilliams, a retired marine, and his son Garrett. McWilliams, senior, was looking for a peaceful occupation when he returned from several deployments. Garrett had spent many happy hours with his grandfather tending his hundreds of hives, so beekeeping was a perfect solution. “They started with 7 hives and today have some 700,” Pedrazza said.

The McWilliams operate Honeycomb Heroes with Garrett’s girlfriend Amanda and several employees, including Pedraza, who said he got involved with the company when his father, also a Marine, worked with McWilliams.

In addition to selling honey and honeycomb products, Honeycomb Heroes offers pollination services and sells bees to those interested in establishing their own hives.

Honeycomb Heroes products are available at farmer’s markets and on its website at http://www.honeycombheroes.com For m.ore information, call 540-498-3573 or e-mail .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address). Honeycomb Heroes is located at 17 Waterfall Lane in Stafford.