Category: Honey Listing

This season felt like it would never get here after such a long Winter and now all of a sudden, BOOM, smack in the middle of a pretty incredible Spring honey season!  Our first two batches are already off the hives, and number three is waiting for the extractor as I’m writing this.  They’re that beautiful pale yellow honey that’s probably mostly from black locust trees.  Our bees go wherever they please, so we don’t have a true varietal, but I can usually tell what the primary source is based on color and flavor and what was blooming a few weeks prior to pulling honey off the hives.  The black locust blossom this year was a full week of sunshine, so the bees worked tremendously hard with no breaks for rainy days.

Can’t wait to work our way through the honey spectrum as it slowly shifts darker and darker as the season goes on.  All the hives are happy and healthy and in fantastic moods (they tend to get a little feisty in July, but right now, they’re 50% sunshine and 50% rainbows and they’re an absolute joy to work with), and Spring has been rather kind to us, especially now that we had a good round of rain.  More to come – hope to see you out at a market or as we drop off your order locally!

We’re slowly winding down our honey season, and every year, I’m a little sad to clean out the extractor one last time and start winter prep for the bees.  There may be another batch or two to go, but the photo above shows the last four honeys we bottled, batches F, FH, G, and H (left to right).  Batch FH is from the Flow Hive, and while we usually split this into a few batches, the frames were remarkably similar this year, so we just combined it into one large batch this time.

The bees have done a tremendous job this year in spite of the weird, slow Spring, dry June, and then the incredibly hot days we’ve had.  It’s a lot of work every year to process all that honey, but seeing those jars all lined up and the amazing array of different colors is what truly makes all the hard work worth it in the end!  We hope to see you out at the Pine Creek Hayloft on Friday, September 11th from 10a-5p, and hopefully in October as well (date TBD).  In the meantime, we hope you’re enjoying the last bit of Summer we have left!

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!

We’re ready finally! I have four batches in jars and ready to go. Bach A, B, and C are $12 per jar, and Batch D is $13 per jar. Jars are 1lb of honey by weight in a glass jar. Return your empty jar for 50 cents off your next purchase!

Batch A is the earliest batch I extracted and is probably primarily from black locust trees. This early Spring honey is sweet and floral.

Batches B and C are a mix of some Spring and Summer honey and are a great example of classic wildflower honey.

Batch D is my rare gem! This honey is mostly buckwheat honey, so it’s a lot darker in color and has a rich taste similar molasses. If you love espresso and dark chocolate, this will be right up your alley. There’s a very limited amount of this honey, and it’s pretty special stuff!

To purchase, you can contact us via Direct Message on Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/phoenixvillehoney/) or email us (info@phoenixvillehoney.com).