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On the sweeter side of life

breezinPosted for Friends to comment on, 4 years ago5 min read

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Honey is a wonderful pure natural resource, and has an array of healing properties but recently when I ran out I settled for some store bought honey, and I can freely admit that I was utterly disappointed when I got home and opened the bottle. The contents was more a watery syrup than honey. And I simply could not help but wonder about the labels they place on these items.

Firstly there is great controversy about the labelling of honey, as people tend to use the terms natural, pure and raw extremely loosely - or twist the terms to suite them adding commercial value to their product. So I went and looked up how those key words are defined in honey, and here is what the search came up with:


Natural Honey
The term natural for any food, including honey, suggests that it
doesn't include any added color, artificial flavor, or synthetic substance.
source

So when it comes to store bought honey, natural honey could mean simply that the product contains honey and contains an array of additives like corn syrup or sugar water to volume up the product.

Where in my opinion I feel that Natural honey should mean what it says - natural in the sense of un-farmed honey harvested from a natural beehive.


Pure Honey
With pure honey,
no additional ingredients
—such as sugar, corn syrup, or artificial or natural flavoring—appear on the label. Pure honey may also be labeled as clover or raspberry honey, depending on which plant the bees derived their nectar from. (Beekeepers typically keep their bees near certain plants exclusively, to ensure that the bees get nectar from only those plants.)
source

Now I can agree with this definition, however I have recently discovered that some bee-keepers that put out honey on larger commercial scales would put out sugar water for the bees to speed up the production of honey with the bees in stead of allowing the bees to collect nectar and producing the honey from that - so yet another way for them to market a bunch of shit.


And then lastly:

*Raw Honey
Raw honey has been neither heated nor filtered. Unless you see the term raw on a honey label, you can assume that it's processed.
source

If honey has not been filtered, then it would still be in combs - so buying commercial honey that is bottled, is more than likely NOT raw - doesn't matter what the label says.


But if you would like to know what real natural pure raw honey looks like - let me show you.

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And the reason that I am so sure is because we have recently had to move a natural hive at a friends house, it was an old hive, that had expanded throughout the years, and with two small children running around it was getting a bit close for comfort.

Once the hive was moved we were able to harvest the mazing spoils.

As you can see the honey cakes aren't all symmetrical or perfect squares as you would come to expect from farmed honey, and in this case the wax is not golden yellow as commonly advertised. In fact the wax is laden thickly with propolis that has accumulated in the honey cakes over time giving it a dark colour.

The colour of the honey itself is directly related to the type of flowers that the bees get their pollen from, this can be managed by placement of beehives in bee farming but in the wild, where bees are not bound to a specific orchard or cultivated selection of flowers, bees will pollinate a wide selection of wild flowers.

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And in this case the result was a deep dark aromatic honey, as you can see above in one of the bigger pieces that I cut open.

Me and my friend then set out to try and get some of the honey bottled for later use. after cutting open the cakes we would let the honey slowly run out through a sift directly into storage jars that we had pasteurised earlier by boiling them in water for a few minutes. Then once the majority of honey had dripped out of the cakes, we took the combs and put them inside a salad spinner to get out some more of the honey still trapped inside them, and this gave us a nice creamy effect similar to that which you can expect from spun honey, you can see the results and differences below.

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Only once we were done with that, did we start on the beeswax separating the propolis from the wax - but that is a whole new story for another day.

So next time you are buying honey, make sure that you are getting a decent quality and never trust the labels on commercial brands, maybe support your local honey farmers directly in stead!

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