It's A Good Year For Honey Nectar
To Make Artisanal Honey

It can only claim its name if it contains at least 51% of one source of nectar. It is often referred to as a monofloral honey also.

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 Honey Varieties who have the honor of calling themselves this.

Tupelo Honey is quite possibly the best known of these special types of honey.

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, the honey bee. Beekeepers place their hives as closely as possible to their chosen area to ensure most of the nectar they collect will be from mainly this source.

This can at times be slightly difficult if there are many other plants in the vicinity because just as we prefer to eat a variety of foods, they prefer a variety of nectar.

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. It is these enzymes they add which makes honey a perfect food.

God Beekeepers will encourage overproduction of the honey so that some may be collected and used for human consumption.

The variations in the collected honey can made a great deal of difference in the taste and color. For example, Locust Honey is very light and mild honey.

Basswood Honey a great favorite and in the world of honey makes the state of Georgia in particular very proud!

Sage or sumac honey is dark in color and usually has a stronger flavor. These particular named honeys are known as artisanal honey.

I have written more about these in my Kinds of Honey article, this was before I discovered just how many varieties of honey there actually are!

Acacia Honey deserves to claim this title. This is a firm favorite for taste, healing and cooking.

Unique monofloral honeys can only 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 they 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 larger the nectar is from a single known source of flowers or plants the greater the chance you will discover one.

Artisanal honeys will taste pretty much the same from year to year. As yet another example as long as the bee hives are placed in a clover patch each season, the bees will collect and process clover nectar. The color and consistency are then more likely to be similar from year to year.

If you were to take that same bee hives and place them in an area where there were two or more main types of blossoms 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 which is the form all types honey start off as. Each year, though, the product would probably 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.