Honey and Propolis
After the winter break, the bees start bringing in nectar and pollen from around early March. By early April the first honey super can already be added – and from then on things move quickly – by mid-July the bees have filled 2 to 3 honey supers. Each super holds a different honey, depending on which plants are in bloom at the time the bees fill it. So the honey varies not only by location, but also by the very box it was gathered in. It ranges from delicate spring honey (cherry blossom) through honeydew in late spring and early summer to a robust summer harvest (e.g. linden) – every batch is one of a kind.
The combs are harvested by hand, the honey is gently extracted1 and never heated, so all its valuable natural compounds are preserved. No additives, no processing – just pure bee honey2.
Alongside honey, I also harvest propolis – the resin bees use to seal their hive and protect it from pathogens. Propolis is essentially the disinfectant of the bee world, which the bees also happen to use to seal drafty gaps in the hive. People have valued propolis for its properties since ancient times. It has antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory effects, which helps with a range of ailments, and no resistance of viruses or bacteria to propolis is known. As far as I know, no one has yet managed to produce standardized propolis extracts, so there remains a degree of uncertainty as to whether every extract achieves the desired effect.
“Cold-pressed” is a term you know from olive oil, and at some point a clever marketer had the idea of applying it to honey extraction too. Here’s the thing: if you were to extract combs warm, or even hot, the comb’s structural integrity would drop so much that the beekeeper’s dreaded comb collapse (Clarkson’s Farm clip) would happen constantly during extraction. The result of a comb collapse is quite a mess: the extraction has to be stopped, broken comb pieces have to be fished out of the extractor, and a fair amount of honey is lost. Nobody wants that, so no sensible person extracts warm when even cold extraction isn’t exactly easy. But it does sound good, doesn’t it? ↩︎
The Austrian Honey Ordinance is quite precise on this (translated from German):
Honey consists essentially of various types of sugar, in particular fructose and glucose, as well as organic acids, enzymes, and solid particles picked up during honey collection. The colour of honey ranges from almost colourless to dark brown. It may be liquid, viscous, or partly to wholly crystallised. Differences in taste and aroma are determined by its respective botanical origin.
Nothing other than honey may be added to honey if it is to be marketed as honey or used as an ingredient in a product. As far as possible, honey must be free of organic and inorganic foreign substances. Except for “baking honey” as defined in § 4, it may not have any foreign taste or smell, must not be in fermentation, must not have an artificially altered acidity, and must not have been heated to such an extent that its natural enzymes are destroyed or significantly inactivated.
With the exception of filtered honey as defined in § 3 (2)(f), neither pollen nor any other honey-specific constituents may be removed from honey, unless this is unavoidable when removing inorganic or organic foreign substances.
Note: § 3 (2)(f) (filtered honey) was removed in the ordinance’s most recent revision, yet the annex still refers to it. Well, editorial slip-ups happen in the legislative process too … I’m curious how long it’ll take for this to be corrected. ↩︎