Our first round of 2020 honey is here and in jars, ready for sale! Those four photos above are of the four different batches we extracted so far this year. A batch is just a single fill of our small, hand-crank, two frame extractor with each fill clocking in around 4 gallons or about 45 lbs of honey. Remarkably, each batch is about the same in terms of color despite the fact that we definitely waited longer to do the first extractor run so that we could process more in one single day instead of piecemeal here and there as frames come off the hives. This was done mostly for safety reasons, to minimize exposure (even though we wore masks and gloves during the entirety of the extracting process), and to keep our workflow contained to one single day. We did have a remarkable season for Black Locust, and given the near colorlessness of this honey, it’s probably primarily from Black Locust trees. Black Locust honey is VERY sweet and has light floral notes. As we go on in the season, through July, we see the color darken until we hit the Buckwheat nectar from our local farms which creates a nearly coffee black honey. Why is honey such different colors? It has a lot to do with flavonoids and phenolic acids, much like the color of grapes and wine. The redder the wine, the higher the content of flavonoids and phenolic acids, and the antioxidant content is also higher. The same goes for honey. The darker the honey, the higher the antioxidant content. We’ll hopefully be extracting and bottling the mid summer run of honey in the next two weeks or so. Everything seems to be taking a little longer with the extra sanitizing and caution to prevent any chance of transmission of COVID-19. We’re a VERY small business and our customers mean the world to us, so we want to keep you safe!
We also added a few new items to the website including two new candle sizes and a tea towel with our logo, screen printed by hand! The logo was created during a printmaking class taken by the Queen Bee of our operation which eventually became our logo and we’ve really fallen in love with it. It felt like a great gift item to have, so we’ve got a few of those tea towels in our inventory! We’re still doing regular deliveries in the Phoenixville area on Fridays, and if you’re just outside the delivery area, email us and we can figure something out.
We hope your summer is going well, or as well as it can, in light of the circumstances!