Guided tour from the bee to the bottle and tasting - French

About this tour

When Tom from our BugBitten team visited Apikol in downtown Quebec, he found a compact urban farm that doubles as a craft distillery. The co-owners—who are both beekeepers and distillers—run tight one-hour tours that take you from live hive observation straight through to tasting their honey-based spirits. It's the kind of place that works because the people running it actually know their stuff, and the setup means you're learning from hands-on operators rather than reading a script. Small groups, proper accessibility, and a real sense of how local food and drink connect.

Highlights

• Watch bees at work year-round through hive observation setup
• Learn distilling directly from one of the co-owner beekeepers
• Taste mead and two house spirits in one sitting
• Urban farm sitting in downtown Quebec—no countryside commute needed
• Fully accessible throughout, including wheelchair and pram-friendly routes
• Intimate group scale—no cattle-call vibe
• See the actual production space where honey becomes alcohol

What to expect

The tour kicks off with observation of the working hive. Your guide—one of the co-owners—walks you through what bees are actually doing across the seasons, and you'll get a genuine sense of how the colony ticks. It's not a lecture; they answer questions as you watch. The pace feels natural rather than rushed, even in 60 minutes.

From there you move into the distillery side of things. You'll see how they take their honey and turn it into mead and spirits—the setup is compact but clear. The tasting wraps it all up: mead plus two of their spirits, sampled in a way that makes sense of what you've just learned. Tom found the whole thing felt cohesive because the same people who keep the bees are the ones explaining what goes into the bottle.

What travellers say

Themes summarised by our team from public information about this tour. Verify specifics on the operator's page before booking.

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