Honey is delicious, and the buzz is that honey has many minerals, vitamins, and antioxidants. If you’re looking for a source of honey, you probably don’t have it quite as easy as Winnie The Pooh. Where can you find a source of local honey that will last you through the winter months?
When To Look for Honey
When you’re looking for honey, timing is everything. Honey extraction happens during the warmer months, so trying to purchase bulk honey in December when the bees are resting or in March when they’re revving up for the year just don’t make much sense. However, the winter or early spring is a good time to plan for next summer’s honey, and you’ll have the time to scope out potential honey sources and put your order in early.
Learn more: Skincare Uses for Coconut Oil and Honey
What Are Your Bees Eating?
Honey is sugar that’s been collected and refined by a bee. Just like you’re conscious of the food your chicken or cows are eating, it’s important to be conscious of where your bees are foraging. If your bees collect nectar from flowers that are in a field that’s sprayed by pesticides, those pesticides could work their way into your honey. In an agricultural area, it’s fairly simple to see what your bees are exposed to: just look around the fields for a few miles around the place where you get your honey, or ask your beekeeper. In an urban or suburban or mixed farming area, bees forage from very different flowers. It’s hard to find honey that’s completely organic unless you know that the fields around the bees are organic. If you’re looking at honey that comes from a mixed or urban area, talk with the beekeeper about his or her management practices to see what organic or non-organic management methods he uses.
Learn more: How To Keep Bees
Is Your Honey Really Local?
Just because the beekeeper lives near you, and has hives near you, doesn’t mean the honey is all local. Many beekeepers ship their bees all over the state, and some state to state, to pollinate crops. The beekeeper is paid for this and it helps farmers immensely. However, it means that the honey produced by those bees is not local. If supporting a local farmer is your goal, this may work for you! But, if you’re looking to buy local honey for it’s health benefits, make sure the bees are kept local. If the honey is going to help you with your seasonal allergies, the bees need to be collecting from flowers in YOUR area.
Raw, Unfiltered Honey
What does that mean anyway? Well, it means the honey has not been heated.
Most of the honey in the stores has been pasteurized, meaning it’s been heated to 145-170 degrees to kill off any yeast naturally occurring in the pollen. Heating also makes it easier to filter impurities (little bits of wax, pollen, dust, etc) out of the honey.
Raw honey can be, and usually is, filtered to some extent. You’re not going to find a bee’s leg or chunks of wax in ‘unfiltered’ honey. Most beekeepers use a fine sieve or cheesecloth to filter out impurities. This can be done without heating the honey and killing off the phytochemicals, antioxidants, and nutrients, and destroying some of the natural flavors of the honey.
You may eat organic food, so you want organic honey. Why is it so hard to find? The problem is that bees move around. Unlike chickens, who generally stay put and forage in an area that you can see, bees can fly for up to four miles and and can cover 50,000 acres of land. To become an organic beekeeper, you need to keep bees in an area that’s free from substances such as pesticides, and this is very difficult. That’s why many beekeepers avoid using pesticide-based treatments in their own hives, situate their hives near healthy organic gardens, but may not have organic certification.
Choosing Honey from Happy Bees
While cartoon bees seem to have a perpetual smile, it’s harder to tell if real bees are happy. However, when you look at the health of the hive, you can try. Why is this important? For one thing, bee populations are in decline. Bees live in a stressful environment full of pesticides, where they’re often moved around and don’t always get to eat the honey that they’ve made. You want to make sure that your beekeeper helps maintain healthy bee populations.
There are many things that a beekeeper can do to keep a hive happy. Many bees get moved from place to place through the pollination season. While this is wonderful for the fruit that needs pollination, it’s harder on the bees. If you can, choose honey from bees that get to stay in one place. Some beekeepers remove the majority of the honey from the hive and replace it with a syrup solution. Honey contains micronutrients and proteins that are important to the bees, while syrup does not. Try to choose honey that comes from a beekeeper who allows some honey to stay in the hive, so that the bees can stay healthy eating their own honey in the winter months. It’s stressful to be disturbed all of the time, and while bees and humans can get along well, the savvy beekeeper only interferes when necessary to check on the health of the hive. Overall, make sure that your beekeeper shows care and sensitivity to the bees, intervening when necessary but striving to allow the bees to do their own thing.
Check out this recipe for Homemade Honey Shower Soap!
Finding Sweet Success
Now that you have your parameters for your honey, how can you find a farmer who’s willing to share? There are a few places you can look.
- Does your grocery store carry local honey? Contact that beekeeper and ask about his practices and about bulk rates.
- Look at local farm directories and their list of products. Do your local farmers also have a few hives? See if they’d like to sell you some honey when you visit to buy produce to preserve. Develop a long term relationship so that you can come back to the same farm again and again.
- Contact beekeeping clubs to find local beekeepers. While very small scale beekeepers likely keep their own honey, beekeepers with a few hives may give or sell some to friends and family. Become a friend!
- If you’re in an urban area, look for groups that are working to restore bee populations and bee habitat. Many of these groups focus on native bees, but some of them also have rooftop hives and small-scale businesses that generate income for their nonprofit.
- If you’re in an urban area or an area with few beekeepers but you enjoy visiting rural areas on vacation, make this vacation even sweeter and use this opportunity to purchase honey from an out of town beekeeper.
With Honey, It’s Good to Have a Backup Plan
Honeybees are rather sensitive to disease and even to variations in the weather. This means that if you want to have delicious local honey, it’s best to have a backup plan or two. That honey source you had last year may need to rebuild hives after a harsh winter of losses. If you rely on small scale beekeepers for your honey, keep in mind that people move and they also decide to move in and out of the world of beekeeping.
Have you found a wonderful source of local honey, or are you a beekeeper yourself? Please add your own ideas of what to look for as people search for the honey source that’s right for them.