Honey from Lone Buck Farm

We are totally obsessed with our bees and think all things related to them are fascinating! We also like to know where our food comes from and what is in what we eat. This page was created to provide that information to you: interesting bee/honey tidbits; how the honey goes from hive to the jar; what is in the honey including things I never would have thought of like the material the hive and frames are made out of. 

We supplement our bees with sugar water only when absolutely necessary. We discontinue supplemental sugar water feeding entirely once our hives are well established. If the hives are left with a substantial amount of their own honey prior to winter, they do not require supplemental feeding. Even with our newer hives, when we place our honey supers in the spring we discontinue any supplemental feeding-this means the honey we extract is pure honey!

Higher moisture content of honey means increased likelihood that the honey will begin to ferment; We aim for 15-18.6%. 

On our farm we use foundationless frames in our beehives. I spoke in more detail about this technique in our blog post "Working Hard for the Honey". In short, there is no plastic in our honey supers touching the honey that we consume and/or sell. This also means there is no wax from unknown origin in our honey supers. This also hopefully means that our bees will eventually be the size they were intended to be, therefore improving the overall health of the colony!

Honey can be filtered (heated and filtered to remove wax, pollen, propolis) or unfiltered. Our honey is unfiltered, meaning we strain it to remove large particles, but all of the beneficial substances remain.   

When choosing containers for our honey, we ultimately went with glass. Glass was the best option for us due to its sustainability, as well as possible health concerns when using other manmade materials.