We’re fortunate to have our home based in Florida. Since Florida is the 4th largest honey producer in the United States, most beekeepers eventually end up here at some point during the year. Over time, we’ve developed close relationships with the best beekeepers found across the nation, and they delivery raw honey to us regularly.
However, that’s just the beginning. While we all love honey’s sweet taste, we go the extra mile to make the best honey for your area’s allergy season too. To accomplish this, we also have beekeepers across the country collecting bee pollen for us. They ship this pollen frozen and then we infuse them into the local honey.
BUT THAT’S NOT ALL… We also hand collect wind-blown pollens that the bees will never collect, like pine, oak, and many other grass and tree pollens. We infuse these pollens into the honey as well, which uniquely strengthens the honey’s effectiveness.
We put a tremendous amount of passion and effort into every bottle of local honey to ensure that it’s loaded with pollens from your area. So, when you ingest the pollens in small quantities, preserved in the honey, you will slowly overcome your allergy.
It has taken several attempts to get the process right, but we finally have a patent pending on the process used to get the pollen to stay suspended in the honey. We bottle every drop by hand. Every bottle is inspected on a light table and debris is pulled out with a pipette such that the honey is not degraded with unnecessary processing.
So, it’s not just a bottle of honey. To many it’s much more than that!
We are often asked if our honey is raw. However, the definition of “raw” is different for different beekeepers.
Honey is harvested into 55-gallon drums. During an orange blossom honey harvest, for example, the bees might make 100 barrels of orange blossom honey over the span of about a month. When the nectar flow stops there won’t be any more orange blossom honey until the next time the orange trees bloom the following season. Since we can’t use all 100 drums immediately, the drums are stored until they are bottled. As they wait to be bottled, the honey in the drums starts to granulate. After about a month or 2, a barrel of orange blossom honey will be solid. There is no way to get the honey out of the drum without heating it.
The question customers should be asking is not “has the honey been heated” but “how has the honey been heated”.Bees keep the honey in the hive at around 90-100 degrees Fahrenheit. Technically, it would be great if we could warm the honey to 90 degrees and bottle it. It will take days, probably weeks, to liquefy a drum of honey at 90 degrees. The degradation of honey increases with heat and with time.
At winter park honey, we’ve taken both factors into account. Our goal is to liquefy the honey at the lowest possible temperature over the shortest period of time. This process is facilitated by stirring. Instead of just slapping a warming belt on the barrel and leaving it to melt, we stir the honey frequently which allows us to warm the honey in a shorter amount of time at a lower temperature.
The proof is in the product. We’ve used the honey many times to heal wounds. We have countless testimonials from customers that have used our buckwheat honey to heal exterior wounds. The effectiveness of the honey for wound care is a good indicator of the ‘rawness’ of the honey. If the honey is heated too much and/or too long, the honey WILL NOT be effective for wound healing.