Living in rural British Columbia has allowed Common the benefits of a bucolic lifestyle, which has naturally influenced her grocery shopping.Illustration by Kat Frick Miller
After the first time her hands entered a beehive, Julia Common says she became hooked. At the time, the now-72-year-old was only 21 and in the process of completing an agricultural studies degree at McGill University’s Macdonald Campus, near her hometown of Montreal.
She had spent her life up to that point being fired from jobs, yet she contacted Dr. S. Cameron Jay, a professor of entomology and a celebrated savant in the world of beekeeping, based at the University of Manitoba, where she took a summer job.
After that, “the bees were always part of my life,” she says. Common moved to rural Delta, B.C., where she has continued her beekeeping into her retirement. She manages 150 colonies of bees, some on her property and others at the Vancouver Convention Centre, where six acres of green rooftop play home to hives, and at Vancouver’s Fairmont Waterfront Hotel, where she’s been looking after the hotel’s bees since 2011.
She also makes her own honey, which she sells for her company, Bees Actually, and runs a number of projects including Bee Well, which works with seniors to reconnect them with food and land through beekeeping and gardening.
“The gardener is very important to all of the pollinators,” says Common, adding that the average person can help bees by planting food and habitats for them.
Living in rural British Columbia has allowed Common the benefits of a bucolic lifestyle, which has naturally influenced her grocery shopping.
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Some of the bees from the 150 colonies Common cares for are on the property of pumpkin, potato, berry and garlic farmers, who give her produce. She also passes other vegetable farms on her drive through town and visits the nearby docks, where she gifts the honey she keeps in the back of her truck to farmers and fishermen. They, in turn, offer her gifts of produce and fish.
Her diet consists mostly of cheese, hard-boiled eggs, vegetables and honey tea with nuts, which she eats off the back of her truck during those 15-hour days, and some type of protein and carbohydrate when she is finished work.
What she saves on her own grub, she spends on the bees.
“I go through about $1,000 in white sugar every year,” she says. With it, she makes a syrup that the bees eat before the season’s over, to bulk them up, in hopes that they’ll make it through the winter.
Beekeeper Julia Common at Southlands.Grant Harder/Grant Harder
How I save money on groceries: I eat less now, but better-quality foods. I have a vegetable garden and an apple tree, which help keep costs down.
How I splurge on groceries: I eat out a couple of times a week, which can be a bit expensive. I often meet beekeepers and we’ll go out and share a nice meal and have a conversation over that.
The hardest shopping habit to keep up: I go to many different places and travel to many farms to get organic produce which is more challenging than going to one place.
How I’ve changed my eating habits recently: I cut out most of the wine I used to drink. I’m intermittent fasting now, which has helped me drop about 30 pounds over a year, which has made it easier to move around between my truck and my bees. I have more energy. The equipment is very heavy, so the lost weight makes a difference.
Five items always in my cart:
- Chicken thighs – Newmans Fine Foods – $12.89 a pack: I usually pan fry them with lemon, a bit of bourbon and my homemade chili honey and eat that with some couscous.
- PEI butter – COWS Creamery – $9.99 for about half a pound: This butter is absolutely delicious. It comes from PEI cows, and I enjoy the taste better than the standard grocery store butter.
- Milk – Avalon Dairy – $9 for one litre: It tastes great, it’s local and it comes in the kind of milk bottle I had as a kid when the milkman used to come up the street, so it brings back nostalgia. The bottles are glass and are worth a fortune. I take them down to Thrifty Foods, a grocery store in town, and they give me money for them.
- Oatcakes – Walkers – $6.99: I usually toss some honey and PEI butter on there for a quick breakfast.
- Cod – Local – $8 for 850 grams: I recently made cod cakes with some fish that I got from a local fisherman.
