Beekeeping
What the Bees Are Working, Month by Month
By Sherry Oleyar
People are sometimes surprised that a bottle bought in June does not taste like the one they bought in September. It is the same bees, the same hives, the same field. But honey is a record of what was blooming, and that changes every few weeks.
Here is roughly how a year runs for us in Lorain County.
April — dandelion and fruit bloom
The first real flow. Dandelion honey is dark, strong and a little sharp — it divides people. Most of it never reaches a bottle, because the colony is rebuilding after winter and eats what it makes.
If you see spring honey from us, it was a generous April.
May and June — black locust, clover, raspberry
The prettiest honey of the year. Pale, almost water-white in a good year, with a clean floral lift and very little weight to it. Black locust in particular gives a delicate honey that resists crystallizing for months.
This is what goes into our early raw wildflower bottles, and it is the one to ask for if you think you do not like honey — it is nothing like the heavy stuff in a plastic bear.
July — basswood and summer wildflower
Basswood — linden, if you grew up calling it that — gives a honey with a distinctive minty, almost menthol edge. It is unusual and people either seek it out or avoid it.
This is also when we cut comb honey, because the bees are building fastest and the cappings are at their whitest.
August and September — goldenrod
The big one. Goldenrod runs hard along the lake and produces a deep amber honey with real body to it — malty, a bit like caramel, with a long finish.
It also crystallizes quickly, which is why the bottles you buy in the fall are usually the first ones to set solid in your cupboard. That is entirely normal.
Goldenrod smells extraordinary in the hive while it is coming in. It is a smell somewhere between old socks and cut hay, and every beekeeper in Ohio knows exactly what it means: the year is nearly done.
October onward — banking enough to last
The bees are done for the year, and so is the harvesting. What is on the hives by now belongs to the colony — it is what gets them through an Ohio winter, and we do not take it and feed sugar back in its place.
What does not stop is the shop. Through the season we deliberately hold back enough of each harvest — raw wildflower, the infused batches, the comb we cut in July — to keep the shelves full and orders going out right through to spring. A bottle you buy in January was not made that week. It was put by back in the summer, waiting for exactly this.
So there is no more taking from the hives, but there is no dead season here either. Candles and soap take over as the main thing happening in the shop, but the honey itself does not run out — that is the entire point of putting enough away.
If you want to taste the difference through the year, our infused honey is the quickest education there is — same base honey, five different directions. Or just come by the shop and ask; we will open whatever we have.