HONEY Spring vs. Summer Harvest TASTE TEST _ HONEY BUTTER RECIPE & All About Honey Bees
### Tasting Honey: A Journey into Beekeeping and the Sweet World of Honey
Hello, my beautiful lovelies! Welcome back. It’s Emmy, and today I’m going to be tasting honey—honey, honey, honey! Who doesn’t love honey? There are people, I’m sure, who don’t love honey, but generally speaking, people love honey because it is sweet and delicious. Humans have been chasing honey since they discovered it because that was before we had refined sugar, and honey is so stinking wonderful—beautifully sweet and natural that it’s worth climbing up trees and dealing with bees for honey.
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#### Beekeeping: A Sweet Experience
As some of you may know, I am keeping bees in my backyard. It has been a wonderful experience. I started last spring, and while I started doing bee vlogs, life happened, and my bee vlogs have trickled off. But there is now a new bee vlog I’m going to try to get all my bee vlogs from last year edited so you can see what happened last year because we’re coming on to spring, which is a second year for me now.
Your goal when you’re buying a package of bees—which includes a queen and a small cluster of bees—is to keep them alive and allow them to build a strong healthy hive. Then you allow them to overwinter, which means they kind of shut down a little bit, get nice and quiet, vibrate, and try to keep warm all winter long. Hopefully, they stay alive, and then come spring, they’ll just burst. Now that they have all their comb built out, they build a really great strong healthy hive, have lots of foragers to go collect lots of nectar, and then you can expect to get a good honey harvest.
We still have another month of kind of winterish spring, and that can be a little bit tricky here in New England because sometimes we do get late snows, which could kill brood—which are the baby bees—because they need to be kept at a very warm temperature. But anyway, fingers crossed that the ladies make it.
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#### The Basic Components of a Hive
The basic components of a hive are the queen. She is the queen bee; she’s the master of everything. If you don’t have a queen, you’re not going to have a healthy hive. You need a queen. The queen lays all of the eggs for the hive for her entire life. She will lay eggs and that will be the new bees. Bee's life is a few weeks—winter bees could be up to a couple months—and in that life cycle, they do different things. In the beginning, their nurse bees take care of the baby bees that are forming, and then they become foragers.
The bees will collect nectar, come back to the hive, regurgitate it into honey cells, and it sounds gross but that deposits some enzymes into the nectar. Then the bees will use their wings to fan the nectar, which will evaporate a lot of the water and get it to the viscosity and thickness we think of as honey. Once it reaches that specific percentage of water, it becomes honey, and the bees cap it with wax.
Honey is fuel for the bees; it’s their source of carbohydrates. They use it in the winter time when there are no flowers blossoming to keep themselves going.
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#### The Flavor of Honey
The flavor of honey depends on a couple different factors: where the hives are located, what part of the country you’re in—you’ll have different plants and different trees growing in different areas—and also what time of year again you’re going to have different things blooming at different times of year.
Today, I’m going to be tasting honey from Sweet Betsy Farm. Karen, thank you so much for sending this to me! She wrote to me asking if I wanted to taste 30 years’ worth of honey. Sweet Betsy Farm is located in Marion, North Carolina, which is a little bit further south from where we are in New England.
Karen sent me four bottles of honey, and as you can see, these honeys all have different colors. This is because these are different types of nectar. This is the early spring nectar and has the lightest color—so this is made from nectar from flowers that bloom in early spring. This is the spring wildflower sp. This is the sourwood, which blooms in the summer to fall, and this is the summer bloom harvest, which has the darkest color.
By the way, this is not a sponsored post; I just wanted to taste a year’s worth of honey.
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#### Tasting the Honey
The first one I’m going to taste is this little tiny jar—this is the early spring, and this one has the lightest color. Let’s open that up… It smells like a beehive—it smells great! It smells sweet and smells flowery like propolis. Propolis is what the bees use to seal off their hive; it’s so fragrant. They collect it from resins from trees and such. Oh, it smells great!
I’m going to put in a little wooden spoon here. I’ve been told you’re not supposed to taste honey off of metal spoons because it can impart a bit of a metallic flavor. But look at that beautiful color… Here we go—*itadakimasu*. Mmm, so good! Sweet, light, just an everlight floral taste in the beginning, and the finish is very sweet and of course has that wonderful honey sticky viscosity—lovely.
This one is the spring wildflower—you may have seen this before. This is honey in its crystallized form. Now, honey never goes bad—the enzymes and the very low water content makes for something that never perishes. So don’t ever worry about your honey spoiling; it won’t. They’ve actually found honey in Egyptian tombs that’s over 2000 years old and perfectly good.
What’s happened here is the honey is crystallized, and what that means is there’s probably a grain of pollen or something in there that the sugars have crystallized around. The honey still tastes just as good; the texture is just a little bit different. If this bothers you, you can warm it up and break those crystals down, and it will become liquid again. This doesn’t bother me at all—in fact, I actually like creamed honey.
Creamed honey is fantastic—that’s honey that’s been purposely crystallized; it’s not as granular as this. It’s also known as whipped honey—it’s wonderful for spreading on toast. Boy, that has a completely different flavor—this one’s a little bit nutty and has a little bit of a kind of citrus flavor to it and florally too—a little bit stronger, definitely than the early spring—delicious!
Award-winning Appalachian favorite sourwood—so I don’t believe sourwood grows up here in the north. This one is kind of an amber color as well, a little darker than the early spring. Oh my gosh—I’m so lucky; I love this job. Oh, that is SO different. So that’s called sour, but it’s not at all sour, of course—it doesn’t taste like wood. It actually tastes more caramel-like—it doesn’t taste like your typical honey. Delicious— a little bit more caramel-y sweet. It doesn’t have any of those citrus or tangy notes from the spring wildflower. Totally different—more caramel-like, delicious!
Of course, it has that lovely silky smooth honey viscosity—love that—and the last one we have is the summer bloom and these are from summer blooming flowers. This one has the darkest color—when I did my fall harvest, my honey also had a much darker color, and around here that comes from the goldenrod that blooms in the late summer. Oh, this one is much thicker—look at that! There are definitely more flavors going on in the summer wildflower—it’s kind of similar to the sour; there’s more caramely notes. It’s not as citrusy as the spring wildflower but definitely more complex. I love all of these—but in terms of just having just straight honey, I think it would be a toss-up between the sourwood and the spring summer bloom—these I feel like were just more complex. Doesn’t taste like any typical squeeze bottle of honey I’ve ever had—delicious!
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#### Bee Products: Beeswax and Lip Balms
Along with her beautiful honeys, Karen also sent me some other bee products—including this little block of beeswax. Beeswax, of course, is created by the bees to build their honeycombs—they build all the hexagons to raise baby bees and also to store honey. The beekeeper, of course, can harvest this, melt it down, and create candles, lip balms, all kinds of wonderful things. If you check out my bee vlogs, you’ll see that I built a very simple wax solar oven melter thing—which is a really simple way to clarify and melt your beeswax.
Karen also sent me two lip balms—I am a lip balm addict! I love Burt’s Bees; I’ve been using it for years. I love the pepperminty zinginess and the moisturizing it does. I use it all winter long—I need to because I have giant lips that I inherited from my father—thanks, Dad! Not complaining—not complaining. So, I’m grateful for lip balms—and she sent me two.
This is the honey and beeswax one, and this is the caramel popcorn—that sounds interesting; let’s do the honey and beeswax first. Unscrew that—that smells really nice, minty peppermint. All right, let’s try it… I got some on my lips—it’s like Winston but not very emollient. There’s a little bit of peppermint in there—not too strong—like it. That’s the honey and beeswax lip balm. Oh, now I’m really feeling the peppermint tingle noise—all right, I should probably wipe some of that off…
All right, next let’s try the caramel popcorn lip balm. Oh, that one smells much sweeter—yeah, kind of artificially sweet and it’s got this kind of peach color to it. All right, let’s give that a go. Oh yeah—it doesn’t taste like anything but it makes you want to lick your lips. It’s like you’ve got dessert on your lips—but not really. This one’s nice too—but reminds me a little bit of a candle—it’s pretty heavy—oh, nice! Great.
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#### Making Honey Butter
Karen also very kindly sent me a big bottle of the spring wildflower honey—and I thought I’d make some honey butter. I’ve never done that before, but it sounds delicious. It’s very popular in the south, and I’m going to use Alton Brown’s recipe because his recipes have never failed me before.
So first thing, we’re going to need is a mixer—so Alton’s recipe calls for one pound of butter. I’m going to do half—I’m gonna do half a batch of this because I think this is going to be good and I don’t want it to end up on my thighs. So yeah, half a pound of butter and an eighth of a cup of honey—boom! After you keep bees, you realize how much work the bees put in to collect all that nectar—and every single drop is precious, precious.
I say a quarter teaspoon of vanilla—just a little tiny splash. Next, we’re gonna add a quarter teaspoon of cinnamon—I’ve seen some recipes that omit this but I’m just gonna trust Alton… Alton okay—once everything is whipped together, we are going to… oh yes! Oh yes, yes, I am too excited about this— all right— all right—all right—cheers.
That’s delicious! I made mine with salted butter by the way—which I recommend—a great combination of salt and honey. This is just very lightly sweetened—very lightly kissed with cinnamon—full of buttery richness—fantastic on toast—it’s like cinnamon toast pulled way, way back just a kiss of sweetness mostly—it’s about the butter—delightful!
I think this would be absolutely earth-shatteringly wonderful on freshly made biscuits—I might have to do that.
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#### Buying Honey: Why Local Matters
My personal take when it comes to buying honey is try to buy locally, support your local farmer, support your local beekeeper. This is good for a couple different reasons:
1. **Supporting the Local Economy**: It supports your local economy—A. You’re also getting all those benefits of your local ecology around you.
2. **Allergy Benefits**: A lot of people suffer from allergies during the springtime, so honey contains a little bit of pollen—and if you’re consuming local honey, then you’re consuming local pollen. By ingesting it, you can actually build a resistance to the allergens of the pollen that you’re actually reacting to. A lot of people have actually found positive results by just ingesting the honey or even bee pollen itself—mixing into yogurt and stuff—it’s lots of protein and really really beneficial.
Also, by supporting your local honey economy, you are actually supporting pollinators. Pollinators are so important—everyone’s been hearing about colony collapse and the importance of bees—but by specifically supporting your local beekeepers and farmers, you’re incentivizing the fact that you are supporting this—and that you encourage these people to continue to do their work.
While beekeeping is very rewarding, it can be very challenging and also disheartening—colonies do collapse and colonies do fail; it requires energy and funds to keep it going.
Lastly, a lot of the honey that you can buy in the supermarket—particularly ones that are very inexpensive—have been doctored—they’ve been watered down or cut with other syrups/sugar waters—and they just don’t taste as good and they’re not truly honey. One way to avoid that is just to buy locally.
And, for some—the most important reason why you want to buy locally—is the flavor. The flavor of the honey that you buy from a small apiary is going to be fantastic—it probably tastes like no other honey that you’ve ever had before.
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#### Conclusion
There you have it—a little honey taste test! Big thanks again to Karen for sending this to me. If you want any information about Sweet Betsy Farm, I’ll put all their information down in the description. And if you’re at all interested in keeping bees, I suggest taking a B class—find your local bee club, do it—it’s so much fun! It’s amazing and you’ll learn so much.
Follow me on social media so you can get regular updates on my bees—I post almost weekly about them—and yeah, I shall see my next one toodaloo—take care, bye… Mhm… good.
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This article captures the full essence of Emmy’s honey tasting journey, her beekeeping experiences, and the importance of supporting local beekeepers. It’s a delightful read for anyone interested in bees, honey, or sustainable living!