We offer both spring and fall honey, and they look completely different. Spring honey contains nectar and pollen from trees and shrubs, and also in our area, from dandelions. Not every beekeeper is blessed with spring honey, but at Philosopher Lane, every spring we have a bumper crop! Our spring honey is a pale yellow, although it varies from year to year. What's in our spring honey? Specifically this year: maple, oak, serviceberries, apple, pear, cherry, plum, blueberries, honeysuckle, viburnums, echinacea, chives, onions, hydrangea, and dandelions. Last year was all about dandelions, but this year, the weather wiped out the dandelions and we saw our bees mostly working the fruiting trees and bushes. For fall honey, typically this honey is a medium to deep golden amber color, the color people most commonly associate with honey, and our honey so far has the following nectar and pollen: grasses, coneflower, lavender, oregano, thyme, blueberries, cucumbers, squash, peppers, basil, sages, coreopsis cultivars, monarda, mint, lambs' ear, clover, goldenrod, boneset, and black eye susans. The photograph with this post is of one of our bees in the oregano of our herb garden in June.
We will never offer specific "types" of honey, such as clover or knotweed, because producing those flavored varieties requires nutritionally harming our bees. There is a fascinating paper published at the NCBI from 2015 that notes that honeybees require Omega 3 fatty acids and a diet with a suboptimal Omega 3:Omega 6 ratio resulted in health declines in the bees. We are not kidding when we say bees are like people - even bees are suffering from too many Omega 6s in their diets! Most people do not realize that bees also need protein and fats, and those vital nutrients come from pollen. When bees are used commercially to pollinate, they are subject to monocultural farming and thus the bees and the baby bees raised during that time period have only a single food source. In February, for instance, thousands of hives are positioned in the Californian almond orchards, and the bees spend 3-6 weeks pollinating just almonds. Almonds are rich sources of Omega 6 fatty acids but poor in Omega 3s. In the wild, bees do not harvest one type of pollen or nectar exclusively: some bees collect pollen and nectar from a stand of wild daisies along the roadside, another group of bees gathers from the neighbor's coneflowers, and yet another group heads into the backyard to work the cucumber patch and so on. Many different types of pollen and nectar are thus brought back to the hive, and the baby bees are fed a variety of pollen from a variety of sources. In other words - wildflower honey is the result of a varied, balanced diet. On our homepage, we discuss how no human mother would ever dream of feeding her child just apples for a month, and that sort of nutrition is equally bad for baby bees. Unhealthy babies grow up into unhealthy adults, and one of the reasons why honeybees are in trouble is very much due to improper nutrition that is a direct result of harmful factory farming practices. Monoculture pollination services are bad for bees.
We encourage consumers to Bee Smart and support local beekeepers and local wildflower honey. Small apiaries tend to focus on honey as their business, rather than pollination services. Smaller apiaries also can afford to be organic, since large operations find the cost to be prohibitive. Does an apiary sell wildflower honey or specific flavors? That alone will tell you a lot about what is going on back in the beeyard. We have an abundance of spring and fall honey because we specifically plant our gardens with nectar and pollen rich sources and have varied plantings for year round food for the bees. We do not, as a regular practice, feed our bees sugar water or supplement with artificial feed in the summer. The dearth comes in July, during the hot season, and our bees eat their own honey and pollen stores - not from a bag of sugar or a bottle of vitamins. That is not to say that we think all feeding is bad - it is better to feed sugar than to have a hive starve, as it is better to feed your kid Twinkies rather than have him starve - but those are emergency measures, not standard operating procedure here. Even some small apiaries feed regularly and that is an open secret among beekeepers. We all have different opinions on feeding - just like parents have different opinions on how best to raise children.
Knowing where your food comes from is vitally important to health. We note that people purchase pasture raised eggs and meat, and we would like to see more wildflower honey being purchased and appreciated. We are Philosopher Lane Honey because we have a bee philosophy of keeping it natural and not doing harm.
Disclaimers: Blog posts are opinions, not advice. One thing all beekeepers will agree on, is that if you ask 10 beekeepers what to do, you'll get 13 different answers. Beekeeping is alchemy, nature, and a bit of magic.
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