manuka honey

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dale popham

New Bee
Joined
Jun 30, 2009
Messages
38
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0
Location
Ashford kent
Hive Type
National
Number of Hives
2
hi i keep reading about manuka honey and being a new bee i have not got a clue how to go about makeing it. could any one give me a clue how to go about it many thanks dale.
 
Manuka is the name of the plant the bees work for nectar. The best way to make manuka honey is to re-locate to New Zealand which is where the manuka plant normally lives but there has been a report of someone making it in the UK on an estate which has manuka bushes.

See http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cornwall/8110860.stm

These folk sold all they made at £55 a pot according to the BBC - but given what they are reported to have paid for their beehives I am sure they needed to recoup the cost somewhere...
 
Its just Marketing hype.

I could add 2 drops of tea tree oil to my honey and have a higher UMF.

But to stop me the University of Waikato in New Zealand have a trademark on (UMF).

It's a bit like the French calling OSR honey "Canola" to get rid of the negative word.

I think we had a post on the forum about a guy who was the only person in the uk selling some kind of unique organic honey ?
 
many thanks well did say i was a new bee cant see me re-locating my hives to new zealand would be quite hard to inspect my hives each week living in uk lol. guess i will have to stick to wild honey. but many thanks anyway.
 
I don't suppose, considering all the claims, that anyone has hinted that it might have a medicinal taste? Tongue in cheek rather than in the jar.
 
I might be wrong but i think manuka honey used to be a bulk honey that many producers viewed as poor quality and it wasn't uncommon for it to be dumped!!

However a few clever marketing bods later and its the most expensive honey in the world.

C B
 
I think this has been mentioned before but have you tasted Manuka honey? I have cause my son sent some back from New Zealand, not because of all the claims but because it is produced and sold as a local honey.
Nice honey, no sign of any medicianal taste. Not fantastic but no worse than UK honeys. Why anyone would want to pay lots for it produced in this country when you can easily get the original from NZ beats me.
 
Geoff would you buy at as a choice off the shelf if it was the same price as uk honey or do you think UK honey has a better taste ?
 
I would prefer Uk honey cause it uses up less food miles, but no better or worse on taste grounds. Not as good as heather honey cause that is the bee's knees as far as I am concerned.
But if you wanted Manuka cause you were seduced by all the hype about it then is it not better to get it from the place where they are best at doing it for a fraction of the price?
 
Apparently it was just great marketing to sell crap tasting honey :ack2: that they couldn't shift. Use a medical angle for the 'benefit' of mankind...Works every time
a bit like the creams that get rid of wrinkles- they sell buckets of it.:svengo:
People are so gullible.
 
The thing is that nobody i have come across who talks of it being "crap honey" has actually tasted the stuff.
I have and it tastes like ordinary honey.
I wonder how much of this is based on truth. The Internet is a brilliant place to spread good ideas and thoughts but also a brilliant place to spread false rumours and information. I have had the same sort of thing with my rare plants where somebody has stated that you have to rip off the first flower buds of a particular plant to get it to survive. I have grown hundreds of the things and its bollocks. It was written by some half wit who had never even seen the flower but people keep telling me that they "know" how to grow these things.
In beekeeping we get it with that thing that Einstein was supposed to have said about us dieing out after a few years if the honeybee disappeared. I have lost count of the number of times I have seen it on web sites and in newspaper and magazine articles.
 
Beadons have you tried a couple of drops of Tea tree oil in the bath ? its just that Tea tree is the Manuka tree.

Its also very good in the bath for pouring over the hair as headlice hate it and if you have school kids you will understand the problem.
 
I would like to emphasise that I did not get it for any health giving qualities. It was sent to me as a local honey and I ate it on my toast as just honey. With the health problems I have had anything less than statins and ace inhibitors is pretty irrelevent to me. But I do like to eat and drink nice things, no junk.
 
I do have it on authority that headlice can survive in very strong undiluted tea tree oil for days!

I was talking about the fact they tend not to get them in the first place rather than getting rid of them..
 
So we haven't met, Geoff! Cos I have tasted it- and it was quite unpleasant.:puke: I don't give opinion if I haven't witnessed the subject.
 
Earlier on I found some of the Manuka honey at the bottom of the jar so in the interests of this forum I sacrificed my taste buds and polished it all off neat.....and it was really nice. A lot better than the Spanish honey that I tasted after that - the flavour of that was coarse by comparison, it was a very dark runny honey from Northern Spain.
The Manuka honey i had was from the Coromandel Region ...and they have honey meisters in NZ :) according to the label that I am reading. Also something about 10% activity which i think is something to do with antibacterial properties I think, but all honey must have that to some extent.
 
It seems like the big sellers rely on brand taste or, like Manuka, a 'hook' to sell their honey. I'm sure I remember someone at my beekeeping course a couple of years ago trying to set up what he called a 'vocabulary' of what honey tastes like, in much the same way as wine. This would give the buyer some idea of what they are buying.

A friend of a friend is a wine taster, I'll send an email off and see if I can get her to come and advise on the best thing to do.

Mike.
 
Beadons have you tried a couple of drops of Tea tree oil in the bath ? its just that Tea tree is the Manuka tree.

Its also very good in the bath for pouring over the hair as headlice hate it and if you have school kids you will understand the problem.

I think that most tea tree oil actually comes from another plant. Manuka is also confusingly called tea tree. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leptospermum_scoparium and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melaleuca_alternifolia

One of our local beekeepers has a manuka bush on her allotment. I guess that as a result her honey contains a (very) little manuka nectar. You'd need to grow acres of the stuff to produce manuka honey. The flowers seem to be quite sparse, although that may be because of the cooler climate here.
 

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