Two late nucs for sale!

We have more beehives than we need; thirteen and counting! Two nucs that didn’t have their queen come back in April got eggs from another strong colony, and now they are booming! We didn’t count brood and food frames, and it IS late in the season, but these girls are stuffed into five frames and need a bigger home soon. So, we have discounted them to $180 including a plastic or cardboard nuc box. Bring the box back and get $10 back! That makes it $170 for you to boost a queenless hive or to start a new colony for next year’s jump start. Call or text 931-674-1055.

Christine Berglund
615-319-3487

We are proud of our honey!

There is no way to describe honey that was made naturally from local plant sources! Our honey was entered in 2023 in what was then billed as the largest honey show in the last half century, in the “black jar” division, which is judged on taste alone. No ribbons to brag about (yet), but a judge told us that our delicious honey made it to the top 20% in the judging. Not bad for the first try! Then in 2024 we didn’t win again (as there was ONLY ONE prize), and jokingly complained to the judges who were on hand. I happened to have a jar of our delicious honey with us, and two of the judges tasted it. I was given a taste of the prize winning honey, which I didn’t consider as good as ours, but tastes do vary. One of the judges said that this surely would have made it into the final round! The other judge concurred, and even traded a jar of her honey for ours! This was higher praise, we think, than the Blue Ribbon we earned at the Maury County fair later in the year, the only time we ever entered in a fair. Here’s the ribbon, but the proof is in the tasting! Our girls forage only the best nectar, and we use only the best methods to preserve its great taste. I jokingly told one of the national judges that we billed our honey as “small batch artisan” honey, and she unsmilingly responded that that is exactly what it is! The larger producers use automated machinery that has myriad ways to change the flavor, and not for the better. Try ours and see! We have a limited supply of spring and summer honey for $20 a pound, in a glass or plastic squeeze bottle. Fall honey is on sale for only $16 for a limited time.

Honey for sale!

We have had the best compliments on our delicious honey! Of course, the most asked for is what beekeepers call “runny honey,” or you would call it simply “honey.” It’s not creamed, it has no chunks of comb in it, but honey can be raw or heated. All honey will crystallize unless it has been cooked. Some starts crystallizing right in the hive, as we saw in 2024. Our summer harvest was cloudy, but not with pollen that was not filtered our. Oh, no; the pollen is there but doesn’t cloud the honey very much, we realized the honey was already crystallizing. Even some frames had opaque cells of crystallized honey. This is unusual but not unheard of.

The reason why some honeys crystallize faster than others is because not all honeys are made from the same source. We suspect that this summer our girls were foraging at nearby farms that may have planted canola, which has been known to cause the honey to crystallize fast. We have honey on our shelf from our 2021 fall crop which is still absolutely clear! And yet the honey harvested almost three years later has become clouded with tiny crystals even before it was bottled. 

You will have the choice of purchasing this naturally crystallized honey, or honey which has been gently heated without cooking it. This does not destroy the enzymes and the goodness that makes honey one of the very best foods for health. We never boil honey or heat it at high temperatures. The bad news is that it will crystallize again. Use up your honey quickly, or enjoy the extra thickness of crystallized honey, or simply heat it slowly by putting it in a pan of hot water, but NOT on anything but a “warm” setting. You can leave a jar of honey in a hot car to de-crystallize, we are told, although we haven’t tried it. Other people have had success wrapping it with a heating pad such as what one would use to start plants.