No. Mostly. For 2 main reasons. First, honey is a very dense, and therefore heavy, liquid which means that the cost of shipping is often as much or more than the cost of the honey. Secondly, we only use glass jars for our honey and shipping a sticky, heavy liquid in glass containers is not a good mix. We also want to focus on selling our local honey locally. While we are not shipping right now, we are looking into shipping options for our range of beeswax products and some of our creamed honey. Contact us if you would like to discuss individual shipping options.

Honey reaches ripeness when its water content is less than 17%. When this low water content level is reached the bees will seal off (or “cap”) the cells of ripe honey. In most industrial beekeeping operations unripe honey will be harvested and then placed into large dehydrators to finish the ripening process. At Red Beard Bees we let the bees determine the timing of our harvest, not our calendar or production schedule. Besides, there is no way that we could afford one of those big ol’ dehydrators.

It means that we handle each and every frame that we harvest from our bee colonies. We inspect each frame for ripeness (aka “cappings”) and then we brush all of the bees off of the frame and back into the colony before we take the frames off to be extracted. (stay tuned as we may post a video about this process to our blog). This is a very different practice from those employed by most large scale industrial beekeeping operations.

Our honey is never pasteurized. In fact, it is never heated to a temperature higher than the standard temperature of the honey bee colonies it is harvested from (approx. 100OF). We do filter our honey just enough to remove bit of beeswax to help keep your honey from crystalizing as long as possible.

Never. In fact, we never heat our honey to a temperature higher than the standard temperature of the honey bee colonies it is harvested from (approx. 100OF).

From the nearly 75 colonies that we keep and manage all over Franklin County Ohio. We have colonies from Whitehall to Worthington, Bexley to Linden, and more.

Yes. Crystallization is a natural process that all honey will eventually go through. Simply put, crystallization is just the sugar in honey changing from a suspended ‘liquid’ form into a solid crystal form. Crystalized honey is to liquid honey what ice is to water. And like ice, crystalized honey only needs a little bit of gentle heat (about 100oF) to return it to its liquid form.

All honey will eventually ‘come out of solution’ or ‘turn solid’. It is a natural process called crystallization. It even happens to the honey inside of honey bee colonies. Crystalized honey is to liquid honey what ice is to water. And like ice, crystalized honey only needs a little bit of gentle heat (about 100oF) to return it to its liquid form. And this gentle warming of the honey is exactly what honey bees do when the honey in their colony crystalizes.