Flowers and Honey
One fun way in which flowers make life better is through honey.
By now you realize that I love all things related to flowers – and that includes honey. In fact, I’m starting to get obsessed with it! I’m still at the beginning of my learning journey about ‘all things honey’, but I definitely already have some interesting information to share with you.
What exactly is honey? Honey is made from the nectar of flowers that are collected by honeybees. There are many different varieties of flower honey available – in fact over 300 types! The colour, flavour and sweetness level varies depending on what type of flower the nectar comes from.
Today I’m going to focus on two types of honey - ‘clover’ and ‘wildflower’. But before I do that, let me just briefly talk about the importance of buying local honey.
As you probably already know, the global bee population has drastically reduced over the past few years due to a wide range of factors. In general, the benefits of buying local honey are the following:
Bee farmers are committed to their bees, making sure they are cared for in a healthy environment. That helps the species thrive.
Having bees around to pollinate local crops benefits all agriculture in the area. Without pollination, crops don’t grow.
Having bees locally helps the environment. Once the honey is produced, if it doesn’t have to travel far to get to you, and therefore the carbon footprint is reduced and energy is saved.
When buying local honey, you support your local economy; and that’s a cycle that we want to keep going.
These are all excellent reasons to buy local. Now, on to comparing clover and wildflower honey:
Clover honey: Clover honey is a ‘monofloral’ or ‘uni-floral’ honey, which means the nectar is predominately collected from one type of flower - in this case, clover. Clover honey is by far the most common type of honey. It’s light-coloured, mildly floral, and sweet. As the taste is clean and clear, with no bitterness, it doesn’t overpower anything it’s paired with.
Wildflower honey: Wildflower honey tends to be darker in colour and stronger in taste than clover honey. I find wildflower honey very exciting because bees have collected the nectar from a multitude of local wildflowers so there are multiple ways it can taste. The types of flowers the bees visit could include poppies, forget-me-nots, marigolds, asters, lavender, dandelions, and cornflower. As you can imagine, the taste and colour vary depending on the mix of flowers the bees visit. Time of year is also a variable, and honey from a certain period in one year can taste very different from the same period the next year.
Right now, I’m buying small jars of honey from different local farms so I can taste many different types. So far, there hasn’t been one I don’t like, although my favourite is from a very small place about an hour from where I live. Making honey is a hobby for this beekeeper rather than a business. Each season he fills up jars of honey, puts them at the end of his driveway and for $5.00 you take a jar home of the most flavourful honey you have ever tried. I literally end up eating it by the spoonful!
I’m going to keep up my research on honey over the summer months. I think this will be a fun little project for me and I look forward to sharing all that I learn with you. In the meantime, if you have a favourite honey, please let me know, and if it’s available to me, I will try it.
Top tip: Often when you go on a trip you bring gifts home for friends and family, or a souvenir for yourself. I’d like to suggest you bring home a jar of honey from the place you’re visiting. This supports the economy of the place you chose to visit and is a great way to say “thank you”, to the area that hosted you.
