If a Honey Is Popular, Why Can’t We Simply Make More of It?

If a Honey Is Popular, Why Can't We Simply Make More of It? 

If a honey is popular, why can't we simply make more of it?

It sounds like a reasonable question.

If people love a particular type of honey, why not produce more to meet the demand?

We used to think that was just common sense. When demand goes up, supply should follow. If people want more, we should simply make more.

It turns out honey doesn't quite work that way.

We only really understood this after we started working in our beehives and spending more time in the places where our honey comes from.

Because honey doesn't start with us.

It starts with nature.

Honey doesn't start in a factory

When people ask why we can't simply make more honey, it is easy to forget where honey actually begins.

It begins with flowers.

The bees need to find them, collect the nectar and bring it back to the hive. The colony then does its part, transforming that nectar into something that can be stored and eventually harvested.

Every part of that process depends on something outside our control.

The trees have to flower.

The weather has to cooperate.

The bees have to be healthy and strong.

And the season has to give them enough opportunity to forage.

We can prepare for a honey season. We can't manufacture one.

We learnt this in Western Australia

Our Jarrah honey is a good example.

Jarrah trees flower when the conditions are right, and our beekeepers watch the forests carefully. They know the landscape, they know the flowering cycles and they have a good sense of when the bees are likely to have an opportunity to forage.

But even the most experienced beekeeper can't make the Jarrah flower.

A season with good flowering can give the bees an abundance of nectar.

A difficult season can give them much less.

And sometimes, the weather simply doesn't cooperate.

We learnt to accept that.

At first, it was difficult.

When you have something people love, the natural instinct is to try to make more of it.

But nature doesn't respond to demand.

Northern Thailand taught us the same lesson differently

We saw something quite different when we travelled into Northern Thailand.

During the longan flowering season, there can be an incredible abundance of flowers across the orchards. We drove for hours from the city to reach some of the apiaries, and when we arrived, it became very obvious why the bees were there.

There was food everywhere.

The bees had an opportunity to forage in large numbers, and the landscape could support a very different kind of honey season.

But even then, the season was never guaranteed.

Flowering depends on the conditions.

Weather can change.

The timing can shift.

And once the flowers are gone, the bees move on to whatever the landscape offers next.

The bees follow the flowers. We follow the bees.

You can't ask nature to hurry

This is probably one of the biggest differences between honey and most of the foods we buy.

If demand for a manufactured product increases, a factory can usually increase production.

Honey is different.

You can't tell a Jarrah tree that you've sold more jars this year.

You can't ask the Longan trees to flower for another two weeks.

You can't make the bees collect nectar when there isn't enough available.

And you certainly can't rush a colony simply because customers are waiting.

There is something quite humbling about that.

We live in a world where we are used to getting more when we want more.

Honey reminds us that some things still move at nature's pace.

So what can a beekeeper do?

Quite a lot, but not everything.

A good beekeeper understands the landscape and the seasons. They know where forage is likely to be available and may move their hives to follow important flowering periods.

We have even joined our beekeepers in moving hives at night, waiting until the bees had returned before carefully transporting the colonies to another location.

But moving the hive doesn't create the flowers.

It simply gives the bees a better opportunity to find them.

That distinction matters.

The beekeeper can work with nature. They cannot replace it.

This is why provenance matters

The more we learnt, the more we began to appreciate why we should know where our honey comes from.

When we say a honey is from Jarrah, there is a real landscape behind that name.

When we say Longan, there are orchards, flowering trees, bees and beekeepers behind it.

It isn't just a flavour we have created and can reproduce whenever we want.

The place is part of the product.

So is the season.

And that means every harvest is, in some small way, its own moment.

Sometimes, less is simply less

There are seasons when we wish we had more of a particular honey.

We know our customers may want it too.

But we have become much more comfortable with the idea that we cannot always have more.

If a season produces less honey, that's what the season produced.

We would rather understand why, work with our beekeepers and respect what the bees and the landscape were able to give us than try to make up the difference by pretending it came from somewhere else.

That is also why authenticity matters so much to us.

We don't want to manufacture a sense of place. We want the place to be real.

Perhaps that's what makes honey special

The fact that we can't simply make more of it is not a problem to solve.

It is part of what makes honey interesting.

A particular honey comes from a particular place, during a particular season, through the work of thousands of bees and the people who care for them.

We can visit the forests.

We can follow the flowering.

We can work alongside our beekeepers.

We can move the hives when the season calls for it.

But ultimately, we still have to wait.

And perhaps that's a good thing.

Some things are worth waiting for because they cannot be rushed.

Honey is one of them.