Why Do We Care Where Our Honey Comes From?

Why Do We Care Where Our Honey Comes From? 

When we first started Hives Keeper, we were simply trying to make better choices about the things we eat and the way we live.

Honey seemed like a good place to start.

But the more we learnt, the more questions we had.

Where did the honey come from? What flowers had the bees visited? Who looked after the hives? And why could two honeys that looked almost the same taste so completely different?

We started looking beyond the jar.

A jar doesn't tell the whole story

The first thing we realised was that honey is very much a product of its surroundings.

Bees forage within the landscape around their hives. What is flowering, when it flowers and what the season brings all influence what they collect.

That means a honey from a Jarrah forest in Western Australia begins with a very different landscape from a Longan orchard in Northern Thailand.

The honey is different because where it begins is different.

We started travelling to find out more

The more curious we became, the more we wanted to see these places for ourselves.

We visited bee farms, forests and orchards. We spent time with beekeepers and asked questions that probably seemed quite simple.

What are the bees foraging on?

When do the trees flower?

When is the honey ready?

How do you know when to harvest?

We learnt that beekeeping isn't simply about collecting honey.

It is about paying attention.

To the weather. To the flowers. To the bees. To the seasons.

And sometimes, to knowing when to leave things alone.

The people matter too

We came to appreciate the beekeepers as much as the honey.

They know their hives and their landscapes in a way that you can't learn from a label.

They know when a flowering season is beginning. They notice changes in the bees. They understand how the weather has affected the season.

And they make decisions about when and how to harvest the honey.

The more time we spent with them, the more we understood that there are people behind every jar.

You can start to taste the place

This is perhaps what surprised us most.

Once we knew a little more about where a honey came from, we started tasting it differently.

Jarrah is deep and rich.

Red Bell is lighter, with a floral and fruity character.

Marri has its own warm, robust character.

Longan is much lighter and more delicate.

They aren't supposed to taste the same.

And we don't think one needs to be better than another.

They are simply telling us something different about where they began.

The more we learn about the place, the more we notice in the honey.

So why does origin matter to us?

Because knowing where something comes from changes how we think about it.

A jar of honey is easy to take for granted.

But when you know that the bees were foraging among Jarrah trees in Western Australia, or among flowering Longan trees in Northern Thailand, the jar starts to feel a little different.

You begin to picture the landscape.

The flowers.

The bees moving between them.

The beekeeper checking the hives.

And suddenly, honey feels like much more than something sweet.

Why we choose the honeys we do

This is why we don't want to simply fill a shelf with different kinds of honey.

We want to know something about them.

Where they come from.

What the bees forage on.

Who looks after them.

How the honey is harvested and handled.

And what makes that particular honey worth tasting.

Sometimes the answer is a particular forest.

Sometimes it is a flowering season.

Sometimes it is simply the people we meet along the way.

We don't expect every jar to tell us everything.

But we like knowing enough to understand where the story began.

It starts somewhere

The more we explore honey, the harder it becomes to separate the honey from the place it came from.

The flowers.

The landscape.

The season.

The bees.

The people who care for them.

It all starts somewhere.

And perhaps that's what makes honey worth looking a little closer at.