Harvesting Our Honey for Sale

Part of life on the farm is the production of fresh produce to eat and sell. For the past year, Gavin has been expanding his knowledge of beekeeping with a mentor. This week we reached the stage of being able to harvest our first crop to sell! We are so excited to be selling honey from home as part of our farm business.

What is Raw Honey?

Raw honey is best described as honey “as it exists in the beehive”. It’s made by extracting honey from the honeycombs of the hive and pouring it over a mesh or nylon cloth to separate the honey from impurities. We filtered our honey through food-grade cheesecloth to remove any wax residue.

Once strained, raw honey is bottled and ready to be enjoyed. All the health benefits that can be removed during a heating or pasteurisation process are still present.

The Steps Towards Selling Honey

The first step towards selling our honey was to get the beehives up and running. Gavin had one hive going last year. Sadly, when he was stuck on the other side of Australia for an extended time last year one of the sheep knocked the hive over. I put it right but the bees were not happy and most of them died or left home.

At this point, he decided to try again with the help of an experienced beekeeper as a mentor. Having invested in better equipment and spent time learning Gavin is more proficient. We now have six hives and our first crop of honey from two of the hives yielded thirty-six 300g jars!

Harvesting the Honey

Bees get pretty annoyed if you disturb their hive so it’s best to harvest the honey late or early in the day. When there is no wind is also best. Bees don’t like the wind. Having discovered I have an allergy to bees, I stayed well away. It makes filming quite hard! Gavin checked the hives and the honeycomb that was capped with wax was removed so we could get to the honey inside.

Once the honey had been harvested and uncapped of its wax, we put it into a spinner which we hired for the day. I have to say the spinner was rather clunky and having never used one before we could see quite quickly why people pay for the electric version! The spinner uses centrifugal force to extract the honey from the frames. We poured the honey into a clean food grade bucket and then proceeded to filter it through cheesecloth to get rid of the impurities.

This type of honey is called raw honey because, other than bits of wax or possible dead bees, nothing is removed. It is not heated or treated in any way and is therefore very pure. The flavour of our honey is very intense and sweet with a long finish.

Bottling the Honey

The last step in getting ready for selling honey was to bottle our golden deliciousness. We’d done previous research and chosen 300ml bottles because they had a vintage look to them. You can buy similar preserving jars on Amazon. The delivery was very fast. I also went on Canva and designed a logo for our product which we uploaded to AVERY. The stickers came in a couple of days and the quality is very good. Our little black labels are stuck on the top of the bottles. A tag will go on the side to show the date we harvested, our details and what the ingredients of the honey are.

I got a bit carried away and had a stamp printed to use on other products too. I had it custom made at an Etsy Shop in Melbourne called Little Laser Co. Imagine the possibilities of having your own stamp for all sorts of household things. I am!

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The finishing touches to Selling Honey

Now the honey is bottled and ready for sale. We’ve labelled it and will include hand written information tags to give it the ‘farm to table’ feel. The labels look great. I can’t wait to see them on other products too! What do you think?