Honey! It's Complicated!

Have you ever gone to the store and seen a shelf of fifty different kinds of honey and wondered to yourself, "Why is there so much damn honey?"

I'll tell you why.

Honey is complicated.

There are almost as many varieties of monofloral honey as there are varieties of flowers, and so many more than that if you take into account the infinitely variable mixtures that we call “wildflower” honey. Last Sunday, I brought my modest collection of ten different varietals of honey over to my friend Martina's backyard farm for a casual honey tasting. Fueled by honey-sweetened cocktails and homemade dill butter, and joined by Patrick Tobin, we tasted each variety in turn.

So what exactly makes buckwheat honey so different from, say, orange honey?

It’s important to note that all nectar-based honeys, regardless of variety, are created in the same basic manner. A forager bee collects nectar from blooming plants, accumulating as much as seventy milligrams (85% of the body weight of an average bee!) from up to 1500 individual flowers per trip. Once back in the hive the forager passes its nectar load to a house bee, which will begin to “ripen” the nectar into honey. The house bee adds enzymes, bacteria, and yeasts, which start to break down and reassemble the natural sugars contained in the nectar into a variety of new compounds. As these reactions take place, the house bee starts to reduce the water content of the nectar, from a starting concentration of between 40% and 95%. It does this by forcing a droplet of the digesting nectar onto its proboscis, stretching it out to increase the surface area of the liquid and fanning its wings to evaporate the water. By doing this, and continually adding more and more nectar, the water content may be reduced to around 17%. At this point, the house bee will store the finished honey in a cell and coat it with a thin layer of fresh wax in order to preserve it.

Tim: This is really interesting honey!
Martina: This is a really interesting drink!

The simple answer to the question of why there are so many kinds of honey is obvious. Honey is generally categorized according to the flower or nectar source it was made from, and that source determines the characteristics of the end product. Buckwheat honey comes from hives surrounded by fields of blooming buckwheat. Orange blossom honey comes from hives placed in citrus orchards. The bees gather nectar from a single source simply because there is nothing else around (oh boy, monoculture!), and it's that singular nectar source or mix of sources that determines the specific aroma, flavor, and color of a honey. Buckwheat honey is buckwheat honey, whether it comes from Pennsylvania or Canada.

The real answer is, of course, a lot more complicated. The average honey is made up of:

17.2% water
38.4% fructose
30.3% glucose
1.3% sucrose
7.3% maltose
1.4% oligosaccharides
1.1% acids
0.17% ash (minerals)
PLUS enzymes, proteins, vitamins, bacteria, yeasts, and pollen.

These, of course, are approximate values, and can vary hugely from honey to honey.

Honey, as you might expect, is about 95% percent sugar of one kind or another (by dry weight). The ratio of fructose to glucose is different from honey to honey and can make a huge different in the perceived sweetness and other qualities of the honey, such as texture and the rate of crystallization. The 1.4% percent average of oligosaccharides may consist of any mixture of complex sugars such as isomaltose, nigerose, turanose, maltulose, kojibiose, αβ-trehalose, gentiobiose, laminaribiose, maltotriose, 1-kestose, panose, isomaltosyl glucose, erlose, isomaltosyltriose, theanderose, centose, isopanose, isomaltosyltetraose, isomaltosylpentaose, and raffinose (to name a few), all of which make some small contribution to the overall taste, depth, and subtlety of the whole. Most of those complex sugars aren't found in the original nectar, but are actually formed during the ripening process via the actions of the enzymes, acids, and symbiotic microorganisms that are added to the nectar in the bee's gut.

Argh, snake, it's a snake! Of buckwheat, buckwheat, buckwheat honey.

People are always surprised when I tell them that honey is quite acidic, but with an average pH of 3.9, most honey is as acidic as diluted table vinegar and contains almost 10 different acids! Gluconic acid, which is the most common and accounts for most of the acidity of honey, is made by the bee-excreted enzyme glucose oxidase and some of the naturally occurring bacteria that exists in the hive. Think of the acid in honey as a flavor enhancer, like salt in baking. You don't (or at least shouldn't) taste it in the end product, but without it the result would be flat, lifeless, and boring.

That's all the easy stuff. Minerals are where it starts to get a little bit harder to explain, but I'll give it a shot. The concentration of minerals in a honey is highly correlated to its color. Dark honeys tend to contain much higher amounts of minerals, particularly potassium, sodium, magnesium, iron, manganese, chlorine, sulfur, and silicon. Unfortunately, not a huge amount of research has been done into the causes of honey coloration, but the current best guess is that it's a mix of many different factors such as the ratio of sugars, the caramelization of those sugars by the natural acid content of honey, and the mineral content.

This sure is a tasty tableau.

The enzymes, proteins, vitamins, microorganisms, and pollen are what's left over, and probably worth a post all their own. The short answer is that honey is chock full of naturally bee-produced enzymes, symbiotic bacteria, yeasts, and protozoa that live within the bee's digestive system and contribute to the ripening process, and small amounts of vitamins and proteins leached from pollen accidentally mixed in during the production process.

Finally, we're left with the golden question.

Why is honey so good?

I have no clue, and frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.

Honey is indefinable.

Honey is amazing.

Honey is magic.


Check out Patrick Tobin's take on the honey tasting and see some more pictures at his blog: www.patrickftobin.com

Martina is planning on posting her impression of the honey tasting as well. It's not up yet, but check out her sweet urban farming blog in the meantime: www.farmtina.com

The Cooks Tale

Illustration of the Cook from the Ellesmere Manuscripts, c. 1410.

A prentys whilom dwelled in oure citee,

There lived a 'prentice, once, in our city,

And of a craft of vitailliers was hee.

And of the craft of victuallers was he;

Gaillard he was as goldfynch in the shawe,

Happy he was as goldfinch in the glade,

Broun as a berye, a propre short felawe,

Brown as a berry, short, and thickly made,

With lokkes blake, ykembd ful fetisly.

With black hair that he combed right prettily.

Dauncen he koude so wel and jolily

He could dance well, and that so jollily,

That he was cleped Perkyn Revelour.

That he was nicknamed Perkin Reveller.

He was as ful of love and paramour,

He was as full of love, I may aver,

As is the hyve ful of hony sweete:

As is a beehive full of honey sweet;

Wel was the wenche with hym myghte meete.

Well for the wench that with him chanced to meet.

Excerpt from The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer.

Twitterpated!

Thank You to everyone who came out to the Brooklyn Kitchen for the honey extraction today!

I've been twitterpated!
Original imaged twittered by The Brooklyn Kitchen

I had a lot of fun talking with you all and answering your questions, and I hope that you enjoyed yourself as well.

With your support, we sold enough honey to pay for the new extractor! That is both A.) Amazing, and B.) Awesome. You'll be able to see it in action again this summer. Or maybe sooner!

The Brooklyn Kitchen is owed a HUGE thank you for hosting us! Hopefully we can hang out again soon!

P.S. If you were at the event and took pictures, would you please share them with me? My email is BoroughBees@gmail.com!

Something Awesome This Way Comes

Guess what I've been reading. . . .

Anyhow, as I alluded to in my last post, there is going to be a SUPER AWESOME BEEKEEPING EVENT this Saturday the 12th of February!

Are y’all up on tenterhooks? You should be.

This Saturday, the Red Hook Beekeeper's Co-Op will be hosting a public honey extraction at the Brooklyn Kitchen in Williamsburg! We're going to bust out our brand-new extractor and spin out all the bright-red maraschino-cherry-factory honey that we have left under the watchful eyes of the bee-loving public.

We're going to be selling Red Hook Red Honey gift sets—1oz. Pyrex test tubes filled with maraschino cherry honey, corked, sealed with local beeswax, and set in a handmade wooden base created from salvaged warehouse structural beams.

The perfect gift for the bee lover in your life!

Test tube samples are only $5, and the set including the base is only $15.

There will also be a very limited quantity of local, NON-red honey from David Selig's hives in Rockaway, Queens. Jars and bottles for filling will be purchasable at the Brooklyn Kitchen and we'll fill them at $10/pound (this may change) until we run out.

Hope to see you there!

Ohio Harvest

As I mentioned earlier (and didn't follow up on (like I promised I would (sorry))), I had a busy birthday weekend in late September, extracting, filtering, bottling (and eating) all the honey contained in these supers:

Full of tasties.

It was a bit of a light year. Three of the hives in Ohio are new after some harsh winter losses, so most of the harvest was from the oldest hive, which runs Minnesota Hygienic stock. Under the best of circumstances, each one of those medium supers can hold about 35 pounds, or 3-4 gallons of honey. This year, with most of the hives concentrating on building up enough stores for winter, the supers went on late and were only half filled by the time they were pulled off. It's important to remember that the bees NEED honey to survive the winter. They don't go to the trouble of making it just so that we can take it; each hive needs up to 80 pounds of honey to make it through the winter. Even with that, a strong hive might need supplemental feeding in the spring before the first nectar flow to jump start its brood-rearing.

Prior to my arrival, my dad had cleared the honey supers of bees and brought them to our house. As you can see, they were sealed up with an outer cover and several pots of geraniums, which served to keep curious bees from getting in and starting a feeding frenzy. They'd like nothing more than to take that honey back, so you have to be very careful and minimize the amount of time the frames of honey are out in the open. I missed a dime sized amount that dripped out of the first super as I was carrying it inside. Ten minutes later, this:

This probably warrants a women/fashion section joke (amirite?), but I'm not up to the task at the moment.

Braving the cloud of hungry bees, we slowly got through all the supers and sealed them back up. We like to recycle the comb, so they went back to the bees to clean out for a day and then into cold storage.  I'll be covering extraction methods (and storage) in their own articles, so for now, I'll leave you with some pictures from the harvest.

Super #1 and our Italian (shockingly, it didn't break down) tangential extractor.

Lookit dat honeeeeeey.  Awwww yeah!

Think Beiber can uncap honey like a pro?  I doubt it.

You spin me right round baby right round like an extractor baby right round round round.
You spin me right round baby right round spinning honey out of cells baby right round.

"Down the hole and through the filter to the bottling spigot we go," never made it as a nursery rhyme, but is germane to the subject at hand.