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Hufflepuff Honey

Phone: +61 434 139 953

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24.01.2022 Barton Jones Wines are open again tomorrow, just out of town if you're up for a relaxing winery visit! Proud stockists of our honey too :).

23.01.2022 Ooh this looks yum. And Donnybrook Butchers are freshly restocked with our honey too, so many reasons to drop in!

23.01.2022 Spring morning must haves

22.01.2022 Introducing our newest stockists - Donnybrook Butchers!

21.01.2022 Lucky attendees at today's Dorrybrook long table lunch (in place of the 2020 food and wine festival) can look forward to seeing our Donnybook Red Gum honey featured in some of the dishes! We hope you enjoy sampling the amazing local produce our local area has to offer.

21.01.2022 Our honey in good company!

19.01.2022 Last day of the school holidays for our boys! What did you get up to over the holidays?

17.01.2022 A bit windy today for swarming, girls! But that warm weather last week has got the bees reving up for spring, and this Queen has abdicated in favour of her soon-to-emerge daughter. Do you think Andy will get lucky and manage to convince her that one of our empty boxes is an awesome now home?

16.01.2022 We all know 'Hunny' is Pooh's favourite breakfast...

16.01.2022 EXPRESSIONS OF INTEREST - Nucleus colonies (Nucs) Limited number available within the next month, from our apiary in Donnybrook. $320 each. Strong, 5-frame nucs with first-year, laying queens. Package includes a new, high quality 5-frame nuc box from Donnybrook Busselton Bee Supplies and 5 new wooden frames with wax foundation. Please pm or call/text 0434139953 for further information.

14.01.2022 Honey 101 - part 2 Honey in the Raw, what’s all the buzz about raw honey? Firstly, what is raw honey? Some honey, just like milk is processes (pasteurized and microfiltered) for a number of commercial and health reasons. In the case of honey specifically, pasteurizing prevents crystallisation, the process of sugar crystals growing in the honey making it feel grainy, and therefore extends its shelf life (my next update will deal with how to sort raw honey that gone this wa...y). Also as part of the process, most commercial honey is micro filtered, again to give that lovely silky smooth feel. Raw honey has not gone through any of this. Have you ever wondered how honey stays fresh in the hive? To put it simply, the bees load it with antibacterial goodness. There are a number of different styles of activity in honey, the most commonly known are Peroxide, Non-peroxide and Unique Manuka Factor, however with hive loads of ongoing research, new (we’ve been doing it for 80 million years already), ways that my clever little sisters keep the sweet stuff fresh are being discovered. The heat treatment used in pasteurisation kills off most of this activity, and the microfiltration removes any pollen grains that have found their way in. Long story short, you turn one of nature’s miracle medicines into sugar syrup. Anecdotal evidence suggests the tiny amount of pollens you ingest in raw honey can reduce hay fever and similar allergies, and honey used as an antibacterial wound dressing is now becoming more common in medicine (Khan et al. 2007, International Journal of Clinical Practice). All these medicinal honeys, that is the ones used for wound dressings and treatments in hospital, are not too different from raw honey you can buy off the shelf, but perhaps they are the top shelf. The key points they are all raw, filtered to get the bits of wax and bee out, but not micro filtered and not heat treated at all. Even the International Honey Commission recommends not filtering with a mesh smaller than 0.2mm to prevent pollen loss. The take home message is that the antibacterial properties of raw honey mean it can be used at home for sore throats, small cuts and minor burns. However don't try treating anything bigger than a boo-boo without medical advice. Also note that no honey is safe for children under 12 months of age. All honeys can carry botulism spores that a mature immune system can deal with but can put babies at risk. So there is a significant body of evidence to back Granny up when she thrust Honey-Lemon drinks at you to treat a sore throat. The best of the best for medicinal purposes are Jarrah and Leptospermum (Tea tree) derived honeys such as Manuka, and there is an increasing body of research to suggest that Marri (WA Red Gum) Honey is also up amongst the most potent. But all raw honeys are good so try a few and see what you like! Buzzingly yours, Huff the Bee Train

13.01.2022 Definitely the season for swarms! Luckily it's school holidays so apprentice apiarist Billy is on hand to help out :).

13.01.2022 This is is very cool. Very early results but fingers crossed.

11.01.2022 Check out this awesome small business we have just discovered... Rick's mustard is amazing! We are proud that our Redgum/Blackbutt blend will soon be contributing to the unique flavour of Rick's products. They are stocked at Donnybrook Butchers, so you can grab a jar to try while stocking up on meat and our honey, along with other local products. https://www.facebook.com/ricklespicklery

11.01.2022 Look at that pollen! It's the yellow/orange stuff in the middle. And all over our shoes ;). As well as it's primary role in plant reproduction, pollen is the best source of protein for bees.

11.01.2022 Our 2020 Blackbutt has sold out. Season permitting, we hope to have more in January 2021.Our 2020 Blackbutt has sold out. Season permitting, we hope to have more in January 2021.

11.01.2022 Andy has a new apprentice! Four year old Charlie is not old enough for his own hive yet, but last week decided he wanted to suit up and help Dad :).

11.01.2022 Honey 101 part 1 - by Huff the Bee Train A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but honey by another wouldn’t taste the same.so what’s in a name? Honey varieties get their name from the dominant type of flowers the bees visited to make the honey, and so you can get Red Gum, Blackbutt, Karri, Gimlet, Box, Jarrah, Wildflower Honey..the list goes on. Each type of tree has nectar with a different mix of sugars and moisture content, which give each honey its flavour.... So how do we know where the bees went? Each species of tree flowers at a slightly different time, so by emptying the hive at the right time it is possible to make sure you get the honey made predominantly from the nectar of a certain tree. The exception being Wildflower Honey which is the name given to honey where the bees have been allowed to forage from a number of different sources of nectar. Look out for our regular posts covering some of the fun facts and background story to where our honey comes from, what varieties we have available and generally how the bees do their thing. Buzzingly yours, Huff the Bee Train Edit: Can any Thomas the Tank Engine fans guess the inspiration for Huff?

10.01.2022 Delivery tomorrow, anyone?Delivery tomorrow, anyone?

08.01.2022 When a beekeeper has a birthday...

07.01.2022 How cool is this :). Shouldn't be long now before the bees transition out of their winter survival mode and start reving up for spring!

07.01.2022 Setting up a flow hive for Barton Jones Wines. Visible from the front lawn. How exciting!

07.01.2022 See if you can spot the queen in Huff's latest update: Honey 101 part 4 - A flick through the family album It may surprise you to know that most bees aren’t steam trains. In fact, I’m the only one I know. Back at the hive my 40 000 sisters and few thousand brothers are all looking after mum, you may call her Queen, or Your Majesty. We have a few different Dads, but in a way every bee is a prince or princess as the Queen is everybody’s Mum.... To misquote Monty Python well how do you become Queen then? When succession is being planned, Mum will lay a normal old egg that ordinarily would grow into another sister, in a special super-sized cell. Then the nurse bees feed her up on Royal Jelly, our secret nectar/pollen/growth hormone mix. It takes less time to make a queen than a normal worker bee thanks to the growth hormones, and once she emerges she will take over the hive. Usually by then mum will have moved on with some field bees to start a new hive elsewhere (that’s what you call a swarm). My brothers are the drones. Their job, to be delicate, is to ensure our species continues. They go out and look for virgin queens from other hives. They are a bit bigger than the rest of us and don’t have a stinger, so they are really only good for one thing . If you see a bee, it’s a girl, we do all the work. The drones are on the ‘hunt’ a couple of hundred meters above your head. So how do you tell the difference? Well take a look at the pictures attached to this post. As you can see, the boys (that’s Theo in this pic) are a bit ‘buff’ and mum is very long and slender. The girls (that’s Suzie in the middle and Gwen bottom right.I won’t name them all there are 40 000 like I said) are the smallest and busiest. We all have a different job to do, but more on that next post :). Buzzingly yours Huff the Bee Train

05.01.2022 You can now find our honey just up the road at Barton Jones Wines. Drop in and see their range of local produce (wines and otherwise!)

05.01.2022 Have you seen Andy around town lately covered in paint? Well here's why! 24 new hive kits, protectively painted ready for our apiary to double over the next few years. Exciting!

04.01.2022 Well this is an interesting article! So cool to see scientific trials investigating the medicinal properties of raw honey. We know it has beneficial properties, but there is so much still to learn. Red Gum (marri) honey is one of those being trialled. https://www.abc.net.au//childrens-tonsils-needed-/12558998

01.01.2022 Honey 101 Part 3 (Including... how to decrystalise your raw honey!) Chemistry and Aeronautics, two human sciences that we Bees just can’t seem to get right. Or perhaps we have them more right than you think! You may have heard it said that bees’ wings are too small to allow them to fly, and yet there we go. In fact, without boring you with the details, bees use our two pairs of wings in a very clever way. The first wing creates an updraft for the second wing to flap through, ...and so create more lift than a wing as big as a bee’s should be able to. The physics will blow you mind. The other science it seems bees struggle with is chemistry. The most sugar you can dissolve in water, at the temperature inside a bee hive, is about 65-70%. Yet no one told us bees that! Honey contains 80% sugar or more. Making it an awesome energy source for us, this after all is why we make it. This simple fact is the reason honey crystallises. Super saturated solutions (things like honey) are not stable so tend to separate. An interesting side note, because of the different sugar mix (more fructose, less glucose), Jarrah honey doesn’t tend to crystallise and is typically ok for people with type 2 diabetes in moderation. To reverse this crystalisation, all you humans need is heat. As water gets warmer it can hold more sugar, so if you warm crystallised honey it will clarify again. You need to be a bit gentle with raw honey to keep it alive so try not to get the temperature above 50 degrees. The best way to so this is to use a hot water bath and float your honey pot in it, or sit it by the fire in winter or on the dash of your car on a warm (not hot!) day. Of course if you are putting your honey on toast or in tea, you may not notice any difference at all between clear and crystallised honey, because chemically speaking they are identical. The flavour doesn’t change, just the texture. So if your honey starts to look a bit cloudy, just give it a warm hug and it will return to its golden goodness or just eat it as it is :). Buzzingly yours Huff the Bee Train