Natural buzz

<p><em>Editor’s Note: Hector Alvarez is the first of four local purveyors who will be profiled in this “Faces of the Farmers Market” series, which will run through the harvest season.</em></p><p>Hector Alvarez of Hector’s Honey Farm in Santa Rosa is a constant presence at farmers markets throughout Sonoma County, where he and his family sell high-quality honey and beeswax candles, fresh eggs and vegetables.</p><p>The third-generation beekeeper takes a low-tech approach to his craft, doing most of his beekeeping work by hand. Unlike other vendors, Alvarez also does all the farming himself, working the earth carefully from the ground up.</p><p>“I do my own compost for the vegetables,” he said. “I feed the chickens good grains that I mix myself. ... You can tell, when you eat it, that it’s a good, fresh egg.”</p><p>Alvarez is equally fastidious about what he feeds his bees, moving around his 600-some hives up to three times a year to provide the bees with fresh food.</p><p>“For the health of the bees, you need to find new sources of nectar,” he said. “I only feed them natural nectar, not syrups.”</p><p>Attention to detail is what makes Hector’s Honey a popular stop for farmers market shoppers of all ages. The honey sticks he offers are hot sellers among youngsterswith a sweet tooth, while adults line up early to snag a carton of his fresh eggs.</p><p>The peace of a recent summer morning on his two-acre farm in Fulton — a former horse pasture endowed with sandy, loamy soil — is punctuated only by the occasional crow of a rooster and the quiet buzzing of bees.</p><p>Behind his small farmhouse, Alvarez is busy picking zucchini and cucumbers from tidy rows of thriving plants. He kicks at the occasional weed, then bends down and checks under the leaves for more veggies.</p><p>“It’s better to pick them young,” he said of the lemon cucumbers. “Otherwise, they get too seedy and too old.”</p><p>Along a side fence once lined with pine trees, Alvarez has planted a veritable Eden of fruit trees, providing his family with peaches and apricots, figs and cherries, boysenberries and olallieberries during the summer and fall.</p><p>“I do my own grafting,” he said, pointing out a wild plum rootstock grafted with various plums and peaches, including the squat-shaped, white “donut” peach. “We like to eat a lot of fresh fruit.”</p><p>As a child, Alvarez grew up in Uruapan, the second biggest city in the Mexican state of Michoacan. His father spent long stretches of time in Sonoma County, picking apples and working in a Sebastopol cannery.</p><p>“The first time I saw him, I didn’t know who he was,” said Alvarez, the youngest of three brothers.</p><p>Alvarez’s father grew up on a ranch where his family grew beans, corn and wheat and raised their own bees, selling the honey and honey products from their home.</p><p>When Alvarez was 13, he started working alongside his father, helping to take care of 200 or so colonies of bees while harvesting the honey, pollen and beeswax.</p><p>When Alvarez moved to Sonoma County at age 15, his father directed him to the honeybee colonies he had left behind in some pine boxes near Sebastopol.</p><p>While Alvarez worked in construction and landscaping for 15 years, he continued to pursue beekeeping, but he had a hard time finding a market for his honey.</p><p>That all changed the day he walked into the Sonoma County Harvest Fair and caught a glimpse of the demonstration hive set up by the Sonoma County Bee Club.</p><p>“I made a connection and that was the key that opened the door,” he said. “I became a member of the club, and I’ve given demonstrations of beekeeping at the Harvest Fair ever since.”</p><p>After dedicating himself full time to beekeeping, Alvarez started looking for a property where he could grow his budding business.</p><p>Five years ago, he bought the small farm in Fulton, where he converted the barn into a “honey house” to process and store honey.</p><p>These days, Alvarez tends to hundreds of bee colonies, which he keeps at various ranches all over Sonoma County, including his own. He produces between 10,000 and 15,000 pounds of honey a year.</p><p>Like the bees, Alvarez is always on the run, trying to keep the hives healthy by supplying them with fresh sources of nectar.</p><p>In February and March, he trucks the hives to the almond orchards of the Central Valley to pollinate the trees in bloom.</p><p>In April, he moves them back to Sonoma County’s prune and apple orchards, where they pick up the flavor of the spring wildflowers.</p><p>In the summer, he moves some hives to Petaluma, where the star thistle is beginning to bloom. The honey and pollen are harvested throughout the summer and fall.</p><p>The busy honeybees convert nectar from flowers into honey for food, storing it in wax combs. Beekeepers collect the excess honey from boxes that are stacked on top of the hive boxes. They also collect the pollen that serves as food for the bees.</p><p>“It’s full of protein and vitamins,” Alvarez said. “The pollen is collected from the flowers, then the bees walk through the trap in the box and it extracts the pollen from the legs.”</p><p>Next to the honey house, Alvarez raises about 150 chickens for their eggs. Next to the chickens, he has planted another vegetable patch where he grows peppers, onions and beans.</p><p>In 2006, Alvarez was invited to Slow Food’s Terra Madre conference in Torino, Italy, where he was honored to carry the flag for the U.S. delegation.</p><p>Alvarez brought his wife and two daughters — now ages 14 and 17 — to the conference as well, so the whole family could learn more about global agriculture.</p><p>While his wife tends the booth at the Windsor and Healdsburg farmers markets, Alvarez takes care of the three Santa Rosa markets on Wednesdays and Saturdays, plus the Sonoma, Sebastopol and Petaluma markets.</p><p>“It’s a good way to move our products and meet people,” he said. “I work hard to make sure everybody likes the products, and I can get feedback.”</p><p>This recipe is from chef/owner Michael Chiarello of Bottega restaurant in Yountville.</p><h3>Sliced Fresh Figs with Vanilla Ice Cream and Rosemary Honey</h3> <p>Makes 6 servings</p><p>For rosemary honey:</p><p>2 cups honey</p><p>2 tablespoons fresh rosemary, chopped</p><p>For figs:</p><p>9 ripe figs (Black Mission and Kadota) sliced in quarters</p><p>Vanilla ice cream</p><p>Pour honey in a double boiler or in a bowl over pan over a water bath. Stir in rosemary. Bring water to a boil and heat honey for 15 minutes. Remove from heat and cool.</p><p>Arrange three fig pieces per bowl with one scoop of vanilla ice cream. Drizzle the rosemary honey over figs and ice cream and serve.</p><p><em>Coming up: garlic guru Yael Bernier of Bernier Farms in Geyserville; heirloom vegetable aficionados Jill Adams and David Moring of Crescent Moon Farm in Santa Rosa; veteran vegetable grower Lazaro Calderon of The Patch in Sonoma.</p><p>Staff Writer Diane Peterson can be reached at 521-5287 or diane.peterson@pressdemocrat.com</em></p>