The European honeybee is an imported species, but one that we have come to know and love here in America. These bees are excellent foragers and efficient pollinators, and much of our fruit production relies on them. What makes them so beloved though, is the sweet thick syrup byproduct that they produce called HONEY.

Honey in its raw and natural form comes in many different colors depending on what flowers were gathered from to produce it, and honey from different regions and sometimes even specific beekeepers in an area often have very different flavor profiles.

Honey that is raw can usually be identified by its thick consistency that is closer to cane syrup than these processed look-a-likes you may find in restaurants or grocery stores, and when it is not micro-filtered, honey contains small pollen particles that can actually help develop resistances to those types of pollen. That is why Honey is often touted as having a beneficial effect on seasonal allergies and even respiratory infections.

But mostly, Honey is an all-natural fructose product that is found as far back as man knew how to write. Indeed, mentions of honey are found even in the Bible, and jars of unopened honey have been unearthed in Ancient Egyptian tombs completely unspoiled by time or bacteria.

Well, the short answer is: We don't. The bees do.

Now, the details of how this tiny insect turns liquid sometimes flavorless nectar into a product that is loved by so many can be a little disturbing for some people. But what you need to know is: honey bees go out and collect nectar from plants, in the process also pollinating those plants, and they bring the nectar (and pollen!) back to the hive.

They process the nectar in their bodies and then put it into the small hexagon-shaped cells of wax that we colloquially call "honeycomb". There, it is further processed by the bees fanning their wings to help remove the moisture content from the liquid until it resembles the thick, sticky substance that we know as HONEY.

Very good question! In most beekeeper's apiaries we use a system called the Langstroth system. This is a universal system with a lot of moving parts that I can describe later in a blog post, but basically it is a system where the bees are housed in a box of a given size. Inside that box are 8 or 10 "frames" of wood on which the bees build their "honeycomb".

By training the bees to build uniformly on these frames, we can harvest the honeycombs easily and without destroying the hives everytime like our ancient predecessors did.

We pull the frames of honey out of the hive once they are sealed up by the bees with wax, use a tool to cut the seal off each cell and then place the frames into a centrifuge spinner that removes most, if not all, of the honey from the frames.

That honey is then strained to remove large pieces of comb or drowned bees that may have gotten into the honey, and then the honey, in its beautiful, raw state is jarred by myself or others. We slap a label on the jars and then the product is sold to you as is.