Wildflower Honey – Raw

Millbrook Road Honey

The weather being what it is, the surest path to a good honey harvest is a colony overloaded with healthy field bees. This requires (what else!) springtime varroa management and boosting colonies with brood from resource hives in time to be ready for nectar flows. We harvest honey before summer deaths, in late July, early August. Our bees find abundant high-quality nutrition in our MonarchSAFE conservation plot, the surrounding woods, and patches of swamps to produce a flavorful wildflower honey.
Our honey room, the barn’s old milk house, is pressured washed and the equipment scrubbed down before the boxes of honey arrive for extraction. As it is extracted the honey is filtered to remove wax and stored in a cool area. It crystallizes quickly, which is an indication of its quality. Heat compromises honey’s integrity, so it is critical to store it in a temperate area and use moderate heat to dissolve the crystals when the honey is bottled. The process of uncapping the frames produces a decent volume of very clean wax, which we render to make into candles and blocks.
In the spring and fall, when the ambient temperature dips below 60, we make batches of creamed honey. This is also called soft-set honey, and is nothing more than honey with a very fine crystal structure, similar in consistency to peanut butter, and much less likely to run off your toast and up your arm.