Gifts for the Season

Hello, honey lovers!

We have comb honey, bottled honey, soaps, and pure beeswax candles available for your gift-giving needs this year. We can provide shipping to individual clients for corporate gifts. We offer clear or holiday-themed cellophane gift bags for soaps, candles, and one-pound bottles of honey. We can also create custom combinations. Sweet gifts for teachers!

 

PRICES:

Soap: $5
Candles: $4
1-lb honey: $7.50
2-lb honey: $12
3-lb honey: $15
1 gallon: $50
Comb honey: $9 (approx. 14 oz.) *We can't ship the comb honey because the containers don't seal tightly.

If you live out of the Golden Triangle area and need items shipped, the cost of shipping will be added to your total.

Link to Farmweek episode, comb honey, and an update

If you want to see the Farmweek TV segment featuring Mississippi beekeepers, click here.

It's mid-October, and Mark is finally harvesting honey, which is so late it's crazy. It's been a tough year, with an incredibly long, cool spring, several hive failures, and difficulty getting the weather needed to harvest.

Last week he pulled 12 supers. One of those was an experiment from last fall: a super with wax foundation instead of plasticell, with the hope the bees would give us solid honeycomb.

Mark managed to cut about 35 squares weighing about 14 oz. each. The honey is dark and robust, with pollen evident. If you want one of these boxes of comb honey, call or text Mark at 662.418.4422. Once they're gone, they're gone. $9 each, refill discount does not apply.

Today he left early to go to the Delta bee yard and harvest there. It will be fun to see and taste the differences in the varieties.

Mississippi State Fair

We went to the State Fair this year, the first time since I moved to MS.

We took my favorite 4-year-old, who made the day so very memorable with his excitement. He never complained or asked to be carried. On the way home he said, "We had a big day. We can go again."

Of course we stopped by the honey booth! We didn't enter anything this year, but this gave us a good idea of how it's done.

900 pounds and counting

On Saturday we extracted about 300 pounds of honey from the Delta. We've had to order more storage containers, as we still have honey at Mayhew to harvest, including what we hope is delicious comb honey.

If you know of any businesses that need a holiday gift for clients, we'd love to help! Last year we shipped our honey all over the world -- the business owner provided the mailing labels and greetings, we boxed everything and took it to the post office.

Cooler weather is making the honey harvest more pleasant! I've also started my fall garden in my raised beds.

Is Your Local Honey Really Local?

When we travel, we like to meet local beekeepers and try local honey. What we've found is that just because honey is sold locally doesn't mean the bees are gathering nectar and pollen locally. For some people, it doesn't matter, as long as the honey doesn't come from China or hasn't been super-heated to the point all of the beneficial enzymes are dead. As long as it tastes good, that's all they need to know.  

This post is not for these people.

Image from yourhealthdetective.com

 For people hoping to use honey as a natural remedy for allergies, where the bees forage is extremely important. The idea is that local pollen, found in local honey -- especially comb honey -- will help the immune system build up a resistance to the pollen in question.

Pollen the bees are storing for their protein needs.

For those of you interested in honey for this purpose, here are some questions to ask the next time you see a road-side stand or farmer's market booth advertising local honey:

1. Are you a beekeeper?
2. If yes: Where do you keep your bees?
3. If no: Where does the beekeeper keep the hives? Or, where does the honey come from?
3. If the honey is gathered from multiple sites, is it bottled separately or combined?
4. Is there a primary nectar source for the bees?
5. Is your honey heated? (Once honey is heated -- some say above body temperature -- you lose some of its enzymes and health benefits.)

Now, the label may tell you some of this information.  Some honey is labeled "buckwheat," "clover," "sage," or "wildflower." That tells you the primary nectar source or dominant flavor of the honey. The label may say "single estate" which generally means the honey comes from one place. Most people don't bother to have their honey tested, and in general it would be hard to say that the bees foraged only on one particular plant type.

Here is a story to illustrate the importance of these questions.  While in California earlier in the summer, a friend mentioned she'd seen a guy set up on a corner, selling local honey. She wanted to try some for her allergies.  Mark and I saw him and stopped.  Here is our conversation:

Keri: "Hey, are you a beekeeper?"
Sales Guy: "I used to be, but now the Mexicans do all the beekeeping for us."
Keri: "Oh. Where are your hives?" (Tries to keep her surprise and disappointment to herself. Looks down, sees several varieties of honey based on plants she knows don't grow in the area.)
SG: "This honey comes from hives down around Ojai. This comes from a couple different places south of Santa Barbara."
Keri: "Oh."  (Thinks to herself, honey from over 100 miles away is NOT local honey. It won't help her friend's allergies at all.)

Now, to be fair, the honey was delicious, pretty in the jar, fairly priced, and tasty -- he let us sample and we bought some. We didn't care about the local factor, but we made sure to tell our friend that it wasn't really local honey.

I'm not trying to undermine anyone, and I want all beekeepers to be able to sell their products. But, I also want consumers to be informed. It is a common practice for beekeepers to sell their honey to someone who is more interested in the marketing side of honey, and that person resells it. Sometimes the  middle man is a beekeeper. The honey in question may or may not come from the same county or region of the state, but it's all bottled under the same label. Therefore, most people assume when they buy this honey, it's local, because they bought it from a local beekeeper. It may be local, and then again . . .

Another possibility is that someone buys honey in the 55 gallon drum from a commercial beekeeper, then bottles it and sells it. This person isn't a beekeeper, but a honey purveyor. The product is still better than what you'd buy off the shelf at a super store, but it may not be local honey. 

This is not an argument about quality. I've eaten honey purchased in all of these situations. It's a matter of knowing where your food comes from and getting truly local honey if that is what you're after.

So be an informed consumer. Just because a local individual is selling honey doesn't mean it's local honey. Investigate. After all, you might meet some beekeepers, and they're crazy nice people.

Local bees hard at work in Steens, MS

Three Types of Honey from Two Different States

Today I present three lovely souvenirs. There would be four, but the very-dark-brown-almost-molasses-wild-pecan honey from Arizona stayed in Arizona with my brother-in-law. (Hi Malcolm!) Honey varies in color based on the time of year it was made (spring honey is lighter, fall honey is darker) and the nectar source for the bees.

First, we have a bottle of mesquite honey from Arizona. Mark picked this up when Robert took him to a fruit stand/farmer's market on Black Friday. ($5.69) I like how the label design reflects the geographical location and producer's name. This honey would be a tasty addition to barbecue sauce or grilling adventures.

Next, the bear is full of desert wildflower honey. When I tasted it at the shop in Pine, it was light in flavor -- just right for me. Generally, I prefer my honey *with* something else, such as butter or peanut butter. Putting a label on a bear is tough (which is why there's a dilemma about packaging -- will the allure of the bear's shape and the squeezable bottle be more popular than a jar?) They use a no-nonsense address-style label on the back.

Finally, I found the comb honey from Oklahoma mentioned in this post. ($8.75) The trouble with comb honey is the time and effort it takes to cut it, not crush it, and get it into the jar. Most of the time, comb honey is noticeably more expensive, so my question is: is it worth the extra time to charge the extra money? In this case, however, the weight of the honey is more than the other jars, so in reality, the Oklahoma comb honey was a real bargain! I like their relatively straight-forward design with the old-fashioned skeps. Yellow and black labels are very common, and some are more memorable than others.
Can you tell I'm thinking about our labels and containers? I hope to have something to share soon. There are so many choices, so I'd love to hear from some of you on your preferences, especially for containers! Glass or plastic? Squeeze or spoon? Check out some options at Brushy Mountain Bee Farm.

NPR Rains on My Parade, Sort Of

One of the most talked-about uses of honey is in fighting allergies. I don't know the source, but somehow Mark learned that raw honey, or honey that hasn't been heated/pasteurized, was better at fighting allergies because it retained more pollen; moreover, honey in the comb was the ultimate allergy fighter as the pollen sticks to the comb.

Recently, a friend who shares my interest in writing and in DIY food production sent me this link to an article by NPR's Morning Edition. Before the text of the article, however, is a well-done video: "Is Honey Good Medicine or Just a Sweet Treat?" She concludes that because bees can't predictably gather pollen from the plants that people are allergic to in any significant amount, honey is not a reliable allergy fighter. For a moment, I was frustrated, because 1) that ruined a good marketing strategy, and 2) Mark has plans to use a build-in-the-package technology next spring, that will result in the bees building honey comb in the plastic containers you use to sell the product, primarily because of its potential to help people with allergies.

Then I remembered that all of the local beekeepers have told him that most beekeepers don't want to fuss with the comb, and it was in high demand, so it was guaranteed to sell. Apparently people love honey in the comb, regardless of its effect on allergies. So, thanks for being just a passing rainstorm, NPR.

(Image from the National Honey Board Web site, which includes a search engine to help you find local honey.)