RAW BERMUDA HONEY

What's the deal with Raw Honey?

Our fall harvest 2021 honey is bottled and available at the following locations:

• Gold Standard inside the Washington Mall
• J&J Produce stands in Warwick and South Shore Devonshire
• The Tuck shop in Southampton
• Lindos Family Foods in Warwick
• Lindos Market in Devonshire
• The Supermart Ltd.

Honey is well known for its multiple uses and is a favorite additive used to sweeten meals and food - and has been for centuries. To give you a better understanding of how it all works we need a little more information. Bees can and will travel up to five miles to collect the necessary resources that the hive needs to thrive. Although they can go the distance, they prefer to travel shorter distances and will usually forage within half a mile - depending on resource availability.

Did you know:

• To produce a single pound of honey bees must forage and collect nectar from approximately 2 million flowers! That accounts for around 55,000 flight miles, and the lifetimes work of approximately 800 worker bees.
• An individual worker bee will produce 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey, in its lifetime.
• Bees create beeswax using glands that secrete wax scales under their abdomen. This wax is then shaped and used to create the hexagonal honeycomb that we're all familiar with. This is resource intensive however and the bees must consume 8lbs of honey in order to produce 1lb of wax!

Bermuda honey is especially unique in that all of the nectar that is collected and used to create the honey comes from different nectar sources. This is unlike honey that is produced in other areas, for example like North America, where bees can collect nectar from only one nectar source.  Given the size of the available resource in Bermuda, this means that our bees feed primarily on wild flowers, along with what we've got growing in our gardens. It makes for a unique and aromatic blend the likes of which are not found anywhere else.

The term raw honey is appearing more and more on grocery store shelves, and is very loosely defined. At its core the definition implies that the honey is not heated past the point of pasteurization (95 degrees F) which had been common practice in days gone by. It has come to light however that highly processing honey removes many of its natural benefits, and reduces it to the equivalent of a simple sugar syrup.  Raw honey that hasn't been pasteurized is packed with phytonutrients, pollen and is said to be naturally antibacterial and anti fungal.