Our season begins sometime in late March or early April, depending on the weather. As soon as it's mild enough, we take the beehives out of their cold room in the barn and place them in a sunny, sheltered location. They are fed artificial pollen made from soy, and sucrose syrup until there is nectar being produced. You can see why organic certification standards for honey production are an ongoing debate in our cold Canadian climate. Neither the soy nor the syrup that are commonly available are certified. Maintaining hives through long periods of artificial feeding is just one hurdle to a truly organic honey product.

Our earliest plants in this area are wild plum, wolf willow, dandelion, leafy spurge, poplar and maple. None but the plum are pleasant for honey at all. In late May, we sometimes take a few hives to our neighbours' farm orchards to collect apple honey. This has the most delicate flavour, and if you've ever wished you could taste the smell of an apple blossom, this is how to do it.

Most larger honey producers rely on canola, as it produces a very heavy honey crop. We don't tend to prefer the flavour, or the increasingly genetically-modified source. For shipping bulk honey, we will sort the darker canola and other less desirable flavours into large barrels. This is what you would get in the store. For our "customer honey," or farm-gate sales, we set aside better-tasting alfalfa and clover honeys.

Interestingly, one of our customers indicated to us that his diabetes was adversely affected by most honeys, including clover, but not by the alfalfa honey we sold him. Honey is a complex substance, and is almost totally sugar, but each plant produces different ratios of complex sugars. It's not at all like refined table sugar.

We don't use direct heat when processing our honey. We scratch the wax cappings off our frames rather than using a hot knife, and store our honey promptly. Placing honey in the freezer maintains a fresher taste. We've also found that if the honey enters the freezer immediately after extracting on a hot day (above 32 Celsius), it will sometimes go "creamed" on its own. This is the "soft," white honey that remains spreadable rather than going hard. It has a finer crystalline structure. Commercial producers use a process of heating the honey to dissolve large crystals, then adding a finer "seed" crystal to create a consistent creamed honey.

The alfalfa honey we sell is not what you'll get in the supermarket.  Every so often when we're shopping, we'll open a container labelled "pure alfalfa honey," smell it, and wrinkle our noses. It's not the same thing. For your own honey needs, we encourage you to get in touch with a local honey producer near you and get the real deal. Bulk processing, particularly heating the honey to make it flow through large equipment systems, takes a noticeable toll on the product.

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