I just had a delivery and I was speaking to the driver about honey and he told me his mother in law recently implied he was not so bright for paying $8 for a small jar of honey from a roadside stand. He thought it was still good value but couldn’t convince his mother in law.
In my earlier post I spoke about raw vs “regular” honey but why the difference in price? It’s all made by the same bees isn’t it?
Well, small scale producers like us don’t have the economies of scale in production, extraction and packaging. In particular, we don’t buy bulk honey to over-blend with what we produce in our apiary because we don’t want to lose what is special about our honey. In wine making terms our honey would considered “single vineyard.”
Like many small scale beekeepers we are also mindful about the care of our bees, not wanting to place our colonies under pressure by taking too much honey at any one time. The relatively smaller amounts we harvest and more hive management that goes into making these decisions also impacts on the volumes we can produce. However, at the end of the day, this is what is best for our bees, and results in a delicious treat for us.