What's the Buzz?

Our Avocado Lychee honey doesn't stay in stock for long. Seemed like as soon as we announced we had some in, orders started pouring in from as far away as Thailand!!

Before I knew it, the honey was gone!

The good news is: We've got one more bucket on hand. I'm watching the level ooze down quickly, but at least we've got maybe another two weeks of Avocado Lychee to go before we run out.

For those of you who might not know....the honey does NOT taste either like lychees or avocados. This honey gains its name based upon the blossoms that provided nectar for the honey. It's dark and delicious, robust but not strong.......and tastes like honey, not the fruits that bear it's name.

Is it TRUE? Does honey really alleviate annoying allergy symptoms? Or is it an old wives tale?

There are so many "superfood" health claims out there, that I take most of them with a grain of salt. (Oh no, wait....forget the salt, remember the blood pressure!)

And that's what I mean! We tend to look at food as a collection of chemical properties, either for or against us. It really takes the joy out of dining! Typically I try to avoid this medicinal approach to food..... 

Which is why I initially hesitated to make the link between honey and allergies! But after many of my customers came back and reported huge improvement in their allergy symptoms when adding honey to their daily diet, I decided to give the thing a second look and see what's what.

Does it work? And if so....HOW? 

This is what I found:

Typical allergy symptoms....runny nose, drippy eyes.....result from an overexposure to a particular allergen. Often, regular allergy shots are the course of action used to minimize this.

If the allergen is pollen based, then hope in honey is well-founded. The bees collect both pollen and nectar, and tiny grains of pollen are present in your honey. Regular honey consumption acts as an immune booster and minimizes the reaction to the pollen. It works just like the allergy shots, but much cheaper and tastier!!

Here's the thing. In order to work, you need honey that contains the pollen that's getting to you. So the honey needs to be produced as close as possible to where you live. This ensures that the pollen from your neighborhood plants will be in your honey.

AND....the honey MUST BE RAW! Once heated, these benefits disappear.

So, got allergies? Raw local honey is your best bet.

HOW MUCH IS TOO MUCH? With honey....there's never too much!

HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH? A teaspoon or a couple of teaspoons a day will do it.

The best strategy is to have local honey for several weeks before the start of the allergy season. However, so many suffering customers came and got our honey as a last ditch effort in the middle of an onslaught of pollen-based misery....and they reported excellent results when they began this daily honey regimen.

Here in Miami I recommend the Tropical Wildflower honey for this because it contains the widest range of local pollens within itself. So find a local beekeeper, get yourself some raw honey, and put away your Kleenex.  Honey for allergies is nothing to sneeze at! 

The Fall honeyflow is ON. We're happy to have a sixty pound bucket of Tropical Wildflower honey, fresh from the hive....and with more on the way. I can smell ripening honey when I walk out my back door, and it smells good! Steve says that someday I'll be able to identify which flowers are blossoming by the aroma of the ripening honey, but I'm not that good yet!

I DO love the way that Tropical Wildflower honey varies from harvest to harvest, based on the combination of nectars that are available in the neighborhood at any given time.

This harvest is a nice medium amber. I think I'll go get myself a spoonful or two. I need the energy! Yum...

I've been thinking about checking out the Coconut Grove Farmer's Market for a long time. I was waiting for our sweltering Miami summer to end before exploring this option...

But Wednesday a friend of mine mentioned that he needed to have somebody cover his booth at the market so I offered my services.

Come and say hello! I'll be booth sitting at the Crackerman booth on Saturday, September 25th from 9 AM - 5 PM, weather permitting. The market is located at 3300 Grand Ave. in Coconut Grove.

Crackerman sells awesome organic crackers and German-style breads, along with great hummus and absolutely combustible hot sauce. 

We'll have a bunch of Avocado Lychee Honey on hand, too! 

Say you read my Local Harvest Blog, and you'll get $1.00 off your purchase!! 

Hope to see you there! 

Did you know? It's National Honey Month! So celebrate sweetness in September! American's consume about 1.5 pounds of honey per person per year. But I think you can do better than that! Be better than average and replace some of that white sugar consumption with yummy, nutritious honey!

You can find out more about honey on the National Honey Board's website: http://www.honey.com

And you can sign up for their FREE Newsletter....THE HONEY FEAST.... so they can email you RECIPES on a regular basis. I love it! You would, too!

At long last, we have Avocado Lychee honey back in stock! We wait all year for this moment! This year's Avocado Lychee honey has a little bit of Longan in there as well. (For those who don't know, Longan's are a lot like Lychees, although the trees fruit more readily here in South Florida.)

This year's batch is a nice, full-bodied dark honey, although it's not nearly as dark as last year's.

It's syrupy and wonderful, and I love to keep a honey bear right next to my computer and give it a squeeze every so often, for an energy burst, instead of coffee!!!

There are a lot of you out there on the waiting list, patiently, expectantly hoping for this honey. Your wait is over!!! But get it while you can, it's in short supply!!!!!! 

We want to spread the love, spread the honey, and spread the blog. Therefore, we are listing the blog with a cool service called Technorati, where all the hottest blogs can be found.

In order for them to list our blog, we must verify What's the Buzz? with the following code: 9W2BKJQMY6D4.

There!

And now, sometime soon, What's the Buzz? will be listed more widely throughout the blogosphere. 

It all happened quite by accident. Literally! One evening in late July my cousin and I were chatting contentedly on the phone. I'd given her some honey, and she wanted to compare it to some of the old honey she had in her cupboard. She took out each jar and read it to me. Clover honey. Orange blossom honey. Kosher honey. KOSHER honey? I'd never really heard of that before. 

The next day, my fiancé Rolf, was badly injured and ended up in the ER in Orlando, some 300 miles away. Needless to say I was worried and concerned. He was really a mess and I was placing frequent calls in to the hospital.

When the phone rang a little later, I quickly answered, awaiting news of Rolf's condition.

"Hello, this is Rabbi Schochet." My heart froze. Ohmygosh. Clergy. They must have run out of priests and now this Rabbi was calling to tell me that Rolf was dead. I think I stopped breathing.

Actually....no!

This Rabbi had seen my listing on Local Harvest and was calling to tell me about the benefits of having my honey certified as Kosher.

And so, I figured it was a sign from God! I'd never even heard of Kosher honey and then when I did the next day an unknown Rabbi from Georgia calls me to tell me about it? I'm Protestant. Rolf's a recovering Catholic and German to boot. I figured it was something profound like that quote from Revelation: "The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations."

So let's hear it for world peace, Germans, Jews, Protestant, Catholics, and honeybees, circumcised or not. Happy Rosh Hashanah for those who celebrate. May your New Year be sweet.

May the bees in the trees be for the healing of the nations....

Let there be Peace on Earth and let it begin with me....

PS. Rolf is fine... 

We all know that the benefits of raw honey are many and varied. Raw honey retains all of it's original vitamins, minerals and enzymes. It's great for allergies! It's tasty and delicious, unrefined, and closer to nature.

So why is it that the majority of the honey found at your local supermarket is NOT raw honey?

Because raw honey will crystallize, and pasteurized honey, which has been heated, takes a lot longer to do so. 

It is unfortunate that once the honey has been heated, it's nutritional benefits and fresh taste have been all but destroyed. 

Supermarkets buy in large volume in order to get the best price. Subsequently, they often have inventory that sits in a warehouse. 

Now, if you were a supermarket chain, and you had honey sitting in a warehouse for months, and you went to ship it and now it had crystallized, how salable do you think it would be? It's still good, but has lost much of it's shelf appeal. 

Therefore, processed, heated honey is more attractive to them, because no matter how it is stored it will keep liquid over a longer period of time. 

Enter, Creamed Honey, which many people confuse with Raw Honey. Creamed Honey has been pasteurized and "seeded" with the desired crystal size in order to create small, fine crystals that are uniform in size and the end product is nice and creamy. Here the crystallization process has been partially controlled in order to create a cosmetically attractive end product. It's thick, spreads easily and doesn't drip...and because those crystals are nice and small it feels smooth on the tongue.  

This process...and it is a "process" done to the honey... nips the crystallization objection in the bud by making crystallized honey what the customer expects, and eliminates the problem of storage, etc. 

Our raw honey is liquid honey. It is fresh and sent to you way before it crystallizes. It has not been heated or processed in any way.

And in the distant future, when your raw honey begins to crystallize....just place the container in a pot of hot water, give it a stir, and your honey will liquify once again! 

Hi honey! Have you ever had the experience that when you pulled your jar of honey out of the pantry, what you saw was a thick, grainy mass? Most of us have! I hope you didn't mistakenly think your honey was bad and throw it out!! Crystallized honey is just fine, and actually the preference of some folks. 

All honey will crystallize over time. What determines how much time are several factors. One is temperature. If you store your honey in the refrigerator, it will crystallize rather quickly. Another factor is floral source. Certain nectars will lead to honey crystallizing at a faster rate than, say, Orange Blossom, which crystallizes more slowly.  

Honey is composed of many things, including natural sugars. Not sucrose, but glucose and fructose. And in addition to temperature and floral source, the percentage of each of these sugars also contributes to it's tendency to crystallize. Each batch of honey is different, especially wildflower, which is a tasty mix of whatever is blossoming at the time. Nectars vary....chemical composition of the honey varies....tendency to crystallize varies.  It's all good!

What to DO when honey crystallizes? 

Very simple! Take your jar of honey, and place it in a pot of hot water. The burner under the pot should be turned off before you put the honey jar in. If your container is glass, please make sure the jar is not cold from the frig or you might shatter your jar!!! 

Remove the lid, and every ten minutes or so, give it a stir. It won't take long for your honey to liquify.  

Good as new! 

Did you know that it takes over two million blossoms and 55,000 miles of flying to make one pound of honey?

Even though temperatures soared to over ninety degrees last Sunday, I donned my beesuit and veil, and went out with Steve to visit the "girls". It was time to harvest our Spring honeyflow! (two months late this year due to our cold winter.)

Once the suit is on and the smoker is lit, the heat of the day was forgotten as we inspected each hive and took off frame after frame of luscious sweet honey.

As usual, Steve's insights into the Queen's realm were memorable. Once the frames of honey were removed, we went down to check out the queen and her daughters in each of the hives. My usual job, which I take very seriously, is to gently smoke the bees as we begin. It calms them. 

Steve was looking to see if varroa mites were taking their toll. These mites can quickly decimate a hive, so it's important to keep a watchful eye. He showed me two different frames. "This one has mite damage." "How can you tell??" "Well," he explained, "Look at the brood pattern". I did. "This one is more like swiss cheese, with some brood [baby bees] all mixed in with cells of honey and pollen." 

He pointed out the other very organized beautiful honeycomb where a large center section was all capped over with babies within, and the honey and pollen were neatly stored on the outskirts, near the edges of the frame. "This frame is perfect. No damage at all." 

He went on to explain that this was all a good sign, because the perfect frame was newer, and the swiss cheese frame was older work, indicating that the hive was currently quite healthy, and the mite damage was old news.

"But how can you tell which one is newer?" I wanted to know. Couldn't it be that the healthy frame was older and the damage was more recent???

Aha! Steve knows all!

He directed me to compare the two frames. The capped over brood in the "mite" frame cells bulged out ever-so-slightly. The cells from the healthy frame were absolutely flat. "These are more mature and getting ready to emerge" he explained about the bulging brood comb. "The ones that are flat are less mature," their eggs more recently laid, and therefore, the happy healthy frame was new, indicating that any mite issues were in the past. 

I so cherish each bit of information he shares with me, giving me greater understanding of life within the hive.

We then spent several happy hours spinning out honey. We filled two 60 lb. buckets full. And we've been deliriously sampling sweetness ever since! 

Beekeeping is more complicated today than in times past. There are a host of difficulties that have beset bees of late, and we're hoping lend a hand in some problem solving.  Enter Stephanie, a researcher with funding from the USDA. We'll be working with her beginning next month in her fieldwork studying Colony Collapse Disorder, as well as what can be done botanically to help control varroa mites in the subtropics.

One of the controls we're hoping to test is NEEM oil. Not cheap, and not without it's own risks to the bees, but it's one of the less toxic remedies we think might work. Our climate is hot and humid, and this has a bearing on the outcome of how certain agents work on the mites and affect the bees.

So we'll be bringing in new hives just for this purpose.  Another interesting control for mites is confectioner's sugar. This is great for the small backyard beekeeper, but not so practical on a commercial scale.

We'll keep you posted as to our progress, and meantime, the spring honeyflow is ON....

We're scheduled to harvest some Tropical Wildflower next week. We'll keep you posted! 

Here's food for thought: Bees don't want you to "catch a buzz". Not from alcohol, anyway. When Steve came by yesterday to add more supers to our busy little hives, we were talking about...ah yes, tequila. My daughter just turned 21, and we had bought a bottle of a nice Mexican tequila to celebrate. Since we don't really drink much, most of the bottle was still full. Steve was working so hard, I offered him his customary glass of water. When he refused, I asked him if he wanted a shot of tequila. It was late Sunday, after all,....a lazy weekend afternoon....

"No!" he stated emphatically. He then went on to explain that bees DO NOT like alcohol on your breath. And he shared an unhappy experience when he had had maybe a beer on his breath and the bees really "went after" him. Apparently the scent of sobriety is far pleasanter to the girls than alcohol on the breath. 

And so I learned something new: Don't catch a buzz with the bees. You'll bee sorry!