We are lucky to live in one of the most remote cities in the world, where we only have to travel for half an hour to be immersed in untouched bushland. We can drive just a couple of hours and have whole beaches or forests to ourselves. While this remoteness and relatively sparse population means we have ready access to some of the best beekeeping country in the world, we really don’t have to go far at all to produce amazing honey.
Raw honey from the suburbs; what is so great about it?
Well, first of all, raw honey produced in suburbia tastes great. From what we have harvested ourselves and sampled from other beekeepers, urban honey has some of the best flavours getting around. We enjoy travelling into the countryside and harvesting monofloral honey (honey from a single variety of plant), but sometimes the urban honey is just too hard to go past. While our rural beehives are able to produce honey with certain flavours and characteristics (such as wandoo honey and jarrah honey) due to Western Australia’s pristine and untouched bushland, our urban blends are really popular. This is for good reason too!
Reduced food miles
When we do travel the long distances to tend to our bush bees and collect our rural honey, our environmental impact is of more significance. We do our best to minimise any impact we have on the land by sticking to defined tracks and not leaving rubbish behind, but the simple fact is, even just the miles we cover contributes to greenhouse emissions. It is an unavoidable aspect of conducting our business.
What is great about our urban hives is that we travel less to tend to them and to harvest our honey. This means less distance travelled between the food source and you, the customer. The less environmental impact that we have in producing the honey and delivering it to you, the better.
Ultra-local, ultra benefits
There is potentially another great advantage to buying ultra-local honey. This honey has come from plants in your postcode, possibly even from
your very own backyard. What’s more, the bees that have visited you have not only collected the nectar from your flowers, but they have also gathered pollen from your neighbourhood as well. This pollen can contribute to hay fever and other allergies. It is suggested by researchers that consuming honey that is from your local area and in turn infused with the same pollen that you may be reacting to, your local honey may help build an immunity to these pollens and prevent allergies.
Keeps the staff happy
Not only this, the bees love it. With a variety of flowering sources, the bees are able to collect honey and pollen almost all year round. Some of our rural hives will need to be moved at certain times of the year due to an absence of flowering, or simply because the only plant to flower in that area may only do so for a few weeks of the year. This places more stress on the bees and in bad years, can mean they struggle quite badly. However, due to an abundance and variety of different plants coming into nectar-flow at different times of the year, our urban hives tend to be a happier bunch. Particularly in the older suburbs with well-established heritage gardens and large native eucalypt trees, the bees can do very well indeed.
Okay sounds good; what’s it taste like then?
When selling honey it is expected that customers will ask us what the honey tastes like. Of course, it is only fair that they also appreciate a nicely worded description that breaks down the aroma of the honey, how it tastes, feels on the tongue, makes them feel on the inside (physically and emotionally), whether their grandmother will like it, if it is good for cats, or how quickly it will crystallise.
While we could give you some idea on how long it will be until the honey crystallises, and we can assume your cat will think it’s good, we at the Perth Honey Company are only simple folk.
Yes, we try every batch before it is shipped off and try to describe it, but we lack the vocabulary prowess to enunciate the pure magnificence of our raw urban honey.
In the absence of our ability to use words good, we prefer to let our products do the talking. While many customers will come to us and request certain varieties of honey, we find a lot of people will end up going with a suburban mix that is named something completely random by us. We try our best to correctly spell the name of the suburb the honey is from, but from there the bees decide the rest. What’s more, urban honey will vary from month to month, postcode to postcode, so you really do get to try something different every time you buy.
While it’s clear that by shopping with us you won’t get a huge deal of descriptors to explain our honey. Well, realistically, urban honey bought from anyone isn’t particularly easy to describe. The best thing you can do is hit them up, ask for some samples, and then buy whatever tickles-your-fancy, or (tickles your throat less for the allergic few out there).
Wrap it up; where can I buy raw suburban honey in Perth?
We could finish by saying that our raw honey from suburbia is the best honey in Perth. Seeing as we have the keyboard and your attention we might as well say that yes, ours is the best raw honey in Perth! …click here to shop now…
Shameless plug aside, lookup beekeepers in your local area and buy from them. Look for beekeepers with appropriately labelled honey, safe food handling practices and council approval. By doing this you can be assured that you are supporting those that are doing the right thing by the industry, and that the backyard honey you are receiving is genuine and safe.
Not only will you be getting a pure and raw natural honey that tastes great and is arguably the most sustainable form of honeys that may also provide you with some great health benefits, but you’ll be supporting the beekeeping industry at the grassroots level and assisting in the ongoing survival of our furry little pollinator friends.
If you liked this post, feel free to share it around with anyone else who you feel may be interested. The more people we can entice into trying urban honey, the better for everyone!