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Artisanal Honey It's A Good Year For Honey Nectar
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Artisanal honey is the kind of honey that is known to the true connoisseur of honey. I think everyone knows that honey is the delicious end product of our friends the little honeybees.
They may even know that the nectar from which honey is produced comes from flowers and from flowering trees and shrubs, even those we grow in our own honeybee gardens.
You may not however, have heard another term applied to the product, that which is called artisanal honey.
Those true connoisseurs who enjoy the taste of one of these special honeys also understand that the taste is truly unique.
But whatever the taste, even an aquired taste, there are some amazing health and also medical benefits of these kinds of honey.
How is Honey Classified?
In order to understand how a honey comes to be classified as an artisanal honey, it is necessary to understand more about the process of producing honey.
Each season, certain flowers and trees blossom in a particular area.
In order to become fertilized and produce blossoms and later seeds, the flower must be pollinated by an outside source.
Typically this process is aided by the activities of honeybees, you may like to read "how do bees make honey".
The bees collect nectar from the blossoms and carry it back to their bee hives where it becomes the product known as honey.
The transformation is complicated and is essentially regurgitation of the nectar after some enzymatic processes by the bees.
The honey is stored in honeycomb cells for feeding and care of the colony during the months when nectar is not available.
Beekeepers encourage overproduction of the honey so that some may be collected and used for human consumption namely us yum yum!
Are There Any Variations?
The variations in the collected honey can made a great deal of difference in the taste and color. For example, locust tree honey is very light and mild honey.
Sage or sumac honey is dark in color and usually has a stronger flavor. These honey products are known as artisanal honey.
These kinds of honey occur when the bee uses mostly one source for the nectar that produces the honey.
If the flowers within a four-mile radius of the hives are mostly sweet clover, the honey is referred to as clover honey. If the bee hives are located in a desert area where the main flowering plant is sage, you will get sage honey.
These honeys are called varietal honeys, or artisanal honey for obvious reasons. They are typically produced from a single variety of nectar.
Granted, there will be a few other random nectar drops in the final honey, because the bee may have picked up a little bit of apple-blossom nectar instead of clover nectar, but by and large the nectar is from a single known source of flowers or plants.
Artisanal honeys will taste pretty much the same from year to year. If the bee hive is placed in a clover patch each season, the bees will collect and process clover honey. The color and consistency are likely to be similar from year to year.
Can This Honey Variety be Guaranteed?
If you were to take that same bee hive and place it in an area where there were two or more main types of flowering trees each year at about the same time, such as locust trees and tulip poplar trees, the bees would collect nectar from both species. The nectar would be processed into raw honey.
Each year, though, the product would taste and look very different.
Perhaps the locusts bloomed slightly ahead of the poplars so there was a stronger percentage of the finished product that included locust honey.
Maybe the tulip poplars got a better timing on the rain showers.
Artisanal honey refers to this kind of honey. From year to year, you never know what the results will be.
The color may be significantly different from last year; the taste will vary. Like choosing a bottle of good wine or if you like to make your own, honey wine.
If you like the taste of this year's honey, you should get several bottles, because you are unlikely to acheive another year's product that taste exactly the same.
