Does Raw Honey Really Matter?

Does Raw Honey Really Matter? 

Hives Keeper didn't start because we set out to become honey experts.

It started more simply.

We were trying to make better choices about the things we eat and the way we live. Somewhere along the way, we became curious about honey.

We had always thought of honey as a natural food. But the more we looked into it, the more questions we had!! 

What makes one honey different from another?

What happens to honey after it leaves the hive?

And what does "raw" actually mean?

Those questions eventually took us to bee farms, beekeepers and, most importantly, to honey that we could taste much closer to where it came from.

That changed the way we looked at honey.

What we started noticing

Fresh honey straight from the comb was different from the honey we were used to buying.

It had more aroma. More texture. More character.

And as we tasted different honeys, we began to notice that they were not all the same.

A Jarrah could be deep and rich.

A Red Bell could be lighter and more floral.

A Longan could be delicate and fragrant.

The more we tasted, the more we started wondering what happened between the hive and the jar.

What the beekeepers taught us

The beekeepers we met didn't talk about raw honey as a trend.

They talked about the honey itself.

When it was ready to harvest. How it came out of the comb. How much to strain. How to handle it without unnecessarily changing it.

They paid attention because they knew that the bees had already done most of the work.

What happened afterwards could still affect what eventually reached us.

The hive is only part of the journey.

What happens when honey is heated?

Honey is mostly made up of natural sugars, but there is more going on in that jar.

Depending on its floral source and origin, honey can contain naturally occurring enzymes, phenolic compounds, flavonoids and other compounds that contribute to its character and biological activity.

Some of these are sensitive to heat.

Prolonged or higher-temperature heating can reduce the activity of certain enzymes, including diastase and glucose oxidase. Glucose oxidase is involved in the formation of hydrogen peroxide, one of the mechanisms associated with honey's natural antimicrobial activity.

So heating honey isn't simply about making it warmer.

How honey is handled can change some of what is naturally present in it.

That doesn't mean heated honey is bad. Heating can have a practical purpose during processing, and the effect depends on how much heat is used and for how long.

It also doesn't mean that raw honey is automatically healthier, or that heating removes everything that makes honey valuable.

But it made us ask a simple question:

If these qualities are already part of the honey, why change more than we need to?

So what does "raw" actually mean?

Raw honey isn't honey that goes straight from the hive into a jar.

It still needs to be harvested, extracted and strained.

The difference is in how much happens along the way.

For us, we keep unnecessary processing to a minimum and handling the honey in a way that preserves as much of its natural character as possible.

It isn't an easy process. 

And it isn't a guarantee that one honey will taste better than another.

It is simply a choice about how we want to handle what the bees have made.

Why we choose raw

The more we learnt, the more we realised that the things we find interesting about honey are already there.

In the flowers the bees visit.

In the landscape around the hive.

In the season.

In the bees themselves.

And in the people who care for them.

We don't want to take away from that unnecessarily.

We want to keep as much of the honey's original character as we can.

That's why we choose raw.

Not because raw is a magic word.

Not because every raw honey is automatically better.

But because less intervention gives us a better chance of keeping the honey closer to where it began.

We want to taste the honey, not everything that happened to it afterwards.

From the hive to the jar

Perhaps that's what we didn't understand when we first started.

Honey isn't simply something we buy in a jar.

There is a whole journey behind it.

The flowers.

The landscape.

The bees.

The beekeeper.

The harvest.

And everything that happens afterwards.

The more we learn, the more we realise that taking care of honey means paying attention to all of those things.

From the hive to the jar, every step matters.