Category: BLOG

What makes Beekeepers Honey different?

If you go on a hunt for good quality honey, what would you need to know? So when I get asked what makes my honey different from others, I take a deep breath and provide a short explanation. This is because I realised that most people don’t know much about honey, other than the fact that it is sweet.

So here we go – I’m happy to share my short explanation about honey here, to allow  honey lovers to understand honey a lot better:

  1. There are plenty of Honey sources such as Bush flowers, Tree flowers, Ground flowers, Seasons and Climates. Flowers will attract bees by perfume, colours, nectar and pollen. Pollen is the protein source for bees; the protein is essential for feeding brood, as, without protein, the hive loses its capacity of reproducing new bees. That’s how bee colonies may shrink from production size into survival size swarm. When bees have rich pollen in reasonable amounts, the hive can double in population and become very powerful. Some of the plants will have lots of nectar, while others will have next to none. Some of the plants will have lots of pollen, some much less. For bees to survive in good conditions, they need excellent combinations of pollen and nectar.
  • What does honey consist of? The composition of honey varies from one floral source to another. The average composition of Australian honey produced from native and exotic plants is water 15.6%, fructose 42.5%, glucose 30.6%, sucrose 2.9%, minerals 0.16% and other constituents 8.24%. These are all-natural, while the concentration of each component can change from plant to plant, while other parameters such as rainfall, floods, cold weather, hot weather, drying winds, and the season of the year would have their influence.
  • A beekeeper knows all the above, including the best locations to put their hives to get the highest yield of honey. Some beekeepers prefer not to move the bees to other areas and harvest only local seasonal honey, relying on the local flora.
  • Every honey tastes differently. The flavour is changing as per the bees capacity to preserve the perfume of the flowers into the honey. Honey will also vary in colours and in consistency. Perfume, minerals, moisture (water content), and enzymes (that either the bees make with their salivary or enzymes brought from flowers) all play their part.
  • When honey is appreciated and bees are loved and cared for by the beekeeper, flavours can differ. It resembles wine tastings – variety extends to as many flower types as we know and beyond.
  • Beekeepers (like us) LOVE honey. We taste honey every day, sometimes a few times a day, to make sure the flavours and perfumes match our expectations.
  • We recommend honey in good faith as a healthy product of nature. We trust our mates, the beekeepers, to do the same and recommend every good looking honey to be tasted. So every day, you might hit that amazing bite you have never had before.

Enjoy Our Honey

The Tree Readers

There is an extraordinary relationship between farmers and trees. Farmers understand their trees by simply observing them as they nourish and irrigate their land and plants. It is in the way farmers watch how the trees grow, as fresh leaves appear, as the bloom gradually evolves, and as the flowers flourish.

Beekeeper’s livelihood depends on their capability of tree reading combined with all the knowledge they have accumulated and processed over the years. However, knowledge about the evolutionary trees is considered a top-secret for beekeepers. Therefore, they will never share the information they have gathered about trees and honey with others. Well, at least not accurately…  which means you will always have to do your research about the trees.

Let’s dig a little deeper into what Tree Reading means. Tree reading in the forest is about trying to understand when the trees will flower, will it have any nectar or pollen or possibly both, and any other information that may be useful to us as beekeepers. Amazingly, trees know all about drought cycles. This is because they have a very long memory, and they can analyse the ‘power of light’. They feel the power of the sunlight and can react to it.

We expect trees to flower every year because our thinking is around the annual cycle in nature. But in reality, some of the trees rest every second year, while some create different flowering cycles. Some trees will flower and regrow at the same time, and some will put more energy and resources into leaf growth rather than for nectar production. Trees have the autonomy to choose their time to bloom or flower. Sometimes, it could happen out of season, sometimes at the wrong time within the season, and in some cases, they would skip a season altogether.

I had seen trees blooming in drought areas weeks before the flood arrived, sometimes in a very small and isolated area. In those areas that were eventually flooded, the trees just “knew” it was going to rain soon and produced new leaves as if it already rained to enable themselves to pump water up when the rain came. Other trees outside the flood areas did not bloom since they knew it would not rain for them. This is an astonishing behaviour we humans refer to as “predicting the future”.

In the beekeeper world, we utilise a lot of knowledge and experience, sometimes with a bit of luck, to be able to spot the right flower in the right location, with plenty of nectar flowing out. Hunting flowers is about knowing where they are located, estimating the time they will flourish, and picking the right patch to get honey accumulated by the bees. Beekeepers will often travel to the flowers, verify they have enough nectar, and bring their beehives to the site to collect pure honey. This process happens all year round, including the slow winter season and even in the coldest areas. Experienced beekeepers will always find flowers that will provide nectar throughout the year, enough to create modest crops of honey during winter and much more during spring and summer.

Chasing flowers and reading trees is a fascinating topic and a “way of life”, but only very few beekeepers have a fundamental understanding of the trees.

Dolfi Benesh