Cornish Food Market

Nature’s amazing sweet treat

October 19, 2011 in Healthy | 0 comments

Honey, a natural sweet food made by bees using nectar from flowers, has a long history of human consumption, and is used today in foods and beverages as a sweetener and flavouring. Honey gets its sweetness from the monosaccharides fructose and glucose, and has approximately the same relative sweetness as that of granulated sugar! It has attractive chemical properties for baking, and its distinctive flavour leads some people to prefer it over sugar and other sweeteners.

And there are health benefits, too - because bees use the pollen from local plants, eating honey that is local to your area is said to prevent seasonal allergies.

At Cornish Food Market, we are proud to supply honey from Gwenen Apiaries – ‘gwenen’ being Cornish for honeybees. Gwenen Apiaries keep the native Cornish honeybee Apis Mellifera Mellifera and produce distinctive specialist honeys flavoured by the wildflowers of the Cornish countryside, heather from the Lizard Peninsula, as well as the more exotic flowers from some of Cornwall’s glorious gardens.

So how is honey made?

Honey is of course the primary food source for bees. The bees visit different flowers collecting nectar and pollen – the flavour of honey is site-specific and varies according to the nectar source. They then process the nectar through a special honey stomach and convert it into honey by repeatedly refining and adding their own special mixes of enzymes which fracture the raw nectars down into the complex range of ingredients found in honey. Beekeeping practices encourage overproduction of honey so the excess can be taken from the colony, leaving enough honey to keep it sustained for the future.

As bees follow nature’s seasonal cycle they are totally dependent upon the weather for their collection of nectar and pollen, so honey cannot produced all year round. Because of Cornwall’s various localised climatic conditions honey crops are not guaranteed. Usually, there are two honey flows in a season, in late spring and summer. And occasionally the bees are able to produce some fine Cornish Heather honey late on in the season.

Bees then are able to store this complete food in wax honeycombs that they create inside the beehive….

And how does the comb get into the jar?

When the honey crop is harvested by the beekeeper this comb is separated using a special extractor to spin the honey out of the combs - as all the cells in the comb are slightly inverted to prevent the honey from running out. After extraction, the honey is sieved to remove remaining bits of wax and left to settle for a number of days. The honey is now ready for bottling.

To prepare the comb for putting into jars, the natural honey comb is wiped clean and inspected then carefully cut out of the frames and placed on a glass cutting board. The comb is then sliced into pieces using a palate knife and carefully picked up and placed into the jar, all ready to be filled with delicious honey!

Sound tempting? Butter the toast and find Gwenan Apiaries' amazing honey at https://cornishfoodmarket.co.uk/shop/browse/C-KIT/G-JAMS/T-HONE