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I find me retailers like it that I keep my honey batches separate, you don’t have to label each type up as say Hawthorn or lime just use a spring label for spring honey and a summer for the summer batches, the retailer can inform the rest.what works for me might not work for everyone BUT a mentored friend of mine who keeps batches seperate had a first prize at the south staffs honey show with his lime honey from my reared bees he has.
It is more time consuming extracting each super separately and I have 4 different named labels but using the same design I could if I wanted to have more, my point: if you have a good design the type of honey is only changing the words and possibly honey analysis/ honey tasting and knowing what the bees have foraged on.
Mark
I only harvested mid August and I did keep the supers from each apiary separate to start with. But because It would only have been in small batches I thought it’s not worth the hassle. Last year some of us here had heather honey in the same frame’s as our summer honey and I managed to extract a good amount of mine . In the end my customers had a new flavour in their jars and I just told them it was different. I didn’t get any negative feedback.
I think it was about 14 of us who took our own honey to an association meeting last autumn for everyone to try. Considering the size of our mainland and the proximity of some of our apiaries we could still taste a difference between nearly all of the samples.
So how far do you narrow down the term local honey. Is it our county, our town or even our apiary.
Being sensible I think most customers would be looking for county or a geographical area.
My tin hat is at the ready.
 
I only harvested mid August and I did keep the supers from each apiary separate to start with. But because It would only have been in small batches I thought it’s not worth the hassle. Last year some of us here had heather honey in the same frame’s as our summer honey and I managed to extract a good amount of mine . In the end my customers had a new flavour in their jars and I just told them it was different. I didn’t get any negative feedback.
I think it was about 14 of us who took our own honey to an association meeting last autumn for everyone to try. Considering the size of our mainland and the proximity of some of our apiaries we could still taste a difference between nearly all of the samples.
So how far do you narrow down the term local honey. Is it our county, our town or even our apiary.
Being sensible I think most customers would be looking for county or a geographical area.
My tin hat is at the ready.
My honeys are marked as the village they come from, some as close as a mile or so. I include the post code on the label to allow people see the approximate location of the hives.
IMG_3317.jpeg
 
Blimey. With all the supers you have it must take absolutely forever and a mountain of buckets. Do you ever get a little frustrated having done six off one hive to discover they are all the same?
Six off one hive? You’ll also be surprised the differences between boxes.
It’s more time consuming but worth every penny
 
I’m not disputing that. Just amazed at your fortitude.
So am I 😉, I’m well pleased that my mentored friend got a first prize with his honey produced from my bees he has.
I will always continue to extract each super separately and hopefully he does
 
So am I 😉, I’m well pleased that my mentored friend got a first prize with his honey produced from my bees he has.
I will always continue to extract each super separately and hopefully he does
The downsides are time and when you partly fill a bucket from a half full shallow and so end up taking up morte storage space. Does make a big difference to the flavour though, and customers really notice the difference.
 
I used to work with bears many years ago and my customers seemed to like them. But I always worried about my honey crystallizing in them so that’s why I stopped. My honey is going cloudy already this year.
Bears seem to be popular in the USA and Canada. I not sure if it’s the type of honey, the processing or both which stops theirs from setting.
 
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Bears seem to be popular in the USA and Canada. I not sure if it’s the type of honey, the processing or both which stops theirs from setting.

The US imports a quite a lot of its honey, so quite possibly it isn't even honey in the first place. What honey there is may also have been pasteurised and filtered to (amongst other things) make crystallisation much slower.

James
 

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