Is your honey organic?
Since honey bees will forage up to two miles away, no legitimate beekeeper can call their honey organic (unless they have their hives on an island). At our apiary we use no chemicals on the plants we grow and tend. And since the bees have plenty to forage on here, they're not likely to get into nasty pesticides or herbicides which would be brought into the hive and the honey. 

How do you process your honey?
Our honey is raw, which means we harvest from the hive, extract and strain into our collection buckets. Raw honey, which comes straight from the beehive, contains healthful bee pollen, bee propolis, and plenty of antioxidants.

What does your honey taste like?
Our Wildflower honey has a variety of flavors - blackberry, citrus, spice, clover, vanilla and even caramel. Some of these flavors are from obvious crops (blackberry), but besides the native plants on our farm, we plant a large variety of flowering annuals, perennial, shrubs and trees which the bees forage on. Some of those are crimson and white clover, Oregon sunshine, buckwheat, phacelia; herbs such as borage, oregano, rosemary and thyme and shrubs like ceanothus, Oregon grape and flowering currant. We've seen the bees in our garden's flowering kale, tomato and squash as well as in the apple, pear, and plum fruit trees and blueberry plants in our small orchard.

As we learn more about varietal honeys we will begin to manage the hives so we can collect those. Right now, our goal is to create a healthy environment for the bees (native as well as honey) as well as the other pollinators.

What can I do about granulation/crystallization of my honey? Does that mean the honey is bad?
When bees make honey, they are creating a ‘supersaturated solution,’ which in this case means the natural sugars (mainly glucose and fructose—from the harvested flower nectar) are dissolved in a tiny amount of water, and the honey stays liquid but very temperamentally so. The sugars start to crystallize over time. The way honey solidifies is also partially decided by the bees themselves, when they choose which blossoms to land on. Each flower species has a different proportion of glucose to fructose in its nectar, and glucose crystallizes more readily than fructose. Unless the honey has been exposed to high humidity and begins to ferment, it will not go bad and will last for a very long time.
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​To liquify your honey again, place the honey in a pan of water that has been heated to a high temperature (not boiling) and is off the heat. The honey will liquify in a few hours. While it is tempting, don't put honey in the microwave or heat it directly on the stove. This will kill all the good antibacterials and antioxidants that are beneficial in raw honey.