By this time each autumn, Santa Fe's honeybees are hiding out. They'll spend the winter hunkered down, eating the food they were busy making all summer.

Other honey-eaters see it as a season to celebrate. This weekend, dozens of members of the Sangre de Cristo Beekeepers met to swap tastes of honey.

"It's good to have a good year," explained veteran beekeeper Les Crowder. "Last year, I had bees in Santa Fe that produced zero honey."

Crowder arrived at the gathering with some of this year's bounty from his 150 to 200 hives located across the region, including two jars of honey that were as different as night and day, but came from hives a few hundred feet apart.

One was such a dark shade of brown that it hinted at black, the other a pale cream color that only hinted at yellow.

"It looks like chocolate or Guinness," said Ken Bowers, who has two live colonies of honeybees near his Eldorado home.

"It has a very strong taste, a good taste," said Crowder, guessing the bees that made it frequently visited the orange flowers of the globe mallow.

What the bees eat is only one part of what makes variety in honey, said taster Liz Clow, who plunged a toothpick into each jar to gather a small blob.

"It's awesome to taste them. They are all so good," she said. "It really gets my brain going. Is it because of how happy they are? The light? What they eat?"

"Whoa Nelly! What is that? Wow," came out of Norma Jones' mouth after someone plopped a new jar onto the table.

Another tasted tart and of maple. Others were amber, fruity, like caramel or the color of champagne. Their labels read "Lamy Liquor" and "Las Campanas Wildflower."

"It's kind of like a wine tasting. Here, everyone is trying to come up with adjectives," said Kate Whealen, one of the group's more experienced beekeepers who serves as a mentor to others.

The ancient craft of domestic beekeeping seems to be a popular hobby, judging by the crowd at the tasting party. It's what "bee-ginner" Fran Nicholson predicts is "the next chichi thing, like cigar bars." She got into the hobby after bees inhabited a wall near her home last year. Having them in a constructed hive that allows for easy harvesting is "an amazing journey," she said.

Charles Brunn echoed that later.

"First there was running, and then there was Pilates, and now there is beekeeping," he said.

A construction contractor, Brunn caught the buzz when someone asked him to build hives about three years ago. Now he has colonies in the yard and another hive on the roof of his home on Don Diego Avenue near downtown.

"They are really cool little critters, and it's very calming to have them in the yard when I come home. They are very gentle. Our cat sleeps on top of the hive in the summer," Brunn said.

Andrew Hoffman got into bees after his wife rejected another idea.

"He wanted a goat and I didn't want a goat. So I wanted to get him into something else," said Brooke Lange. "I bought him a bunch of books about beekeeping."

Now the family has a few hives at their home off Tano Road. Even though there are few wildflowers there, Hoffman said the colony appears to collect nectar at a vacant lot next door, where alfalfa grows.

"The bees know how to take care of themselves, and they are kind of contained and they do their own thing," Lange said.

Bees from a single hive can produce up to 50 pounds of honey on a good year, like this one, or zero to 10 pounds during a summer like 2008.

Crowder, who has been beekeeping for 35 years, said he's not sure why honey production was so low in the region that summer, but he suspects the weather pattern was to blame.

The trend of family beekeeping in Northern New Mexico is different from the conditions when he started off in the industry. Twenty years ago, he said, there were a handful of commercial beekeepers who had 2,000 to 3,000 hives each and who employed a variety of pesticides as part of regular operations.

Today's small-scale practices are much healthier for people and for the bees, he said.

Contact Julie Ann Grimm at 986-3017 or jgrimm@sfnewmexican.com.