Rob Justice has been coming to the Goldstream Station market for years, showing off his bees and selling honey.
“The queen’s in there, you just have to look carefully,” he says to two children peering intently into his glass display case, where hundreds of honeybees bustle and buzz over their hexagonal wax frame.
Noses pressed close, the kids are finally rewarded with a glimpse of the regal bee, whose body is longer than the workers, adorned with a white dot.
Highland Honey Farm is just one of a number of vendors that have called the market home for years, but new folks still come in from time to time. This is Melissa Piasta’s first season at the Goldstream Station market. Morphed Mail, her line of postage stamp jewelry, was built from her collection of unique and picturesque stamps garnered from the Goldstream swap meets when she was a kid, and the pieces have only grown in popularity.
“The West Shore has totally embraced it,” she says.
She makes a point of labelling each item with the year and country of the stamp used. One mismatched set of woolly mammoth earrings came from a single 1966 Romanian stamp; others come from Russia, Cuba, Malta and countless other exotic locales.
On the edible side of things, dozens of booths offer gluten-free baked goodies, kale chips sprinkled with hot sauce and tahini, homemade cookies, and basketfuls of fresh produce, including one spectacular seven-pound zucchini.
The market runs every Saturday, 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. until Oct. 25 at Veteran’s Memorial Park.
acowan@goldstreamgazette.com