Our Raw Honey
Currently you can only buy our honey from Karri Country Good Food an incorporated volunteer run co-operative less that 7 kms from Dragonfly Meadow. Whilst visiting this store you can buy a variety of locally produced fresh food.
500g Jars of Dragonfly Meadow are currently: Available
What you need to know:
Not Homogenised: If the jars look different in color or the level of crystallisation, that is due to the honey being processed and bottled as it is spun from the hives
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As the bees pull in nectar from plants flowering at the time, and the source of the nectar will affect the taste, color and speed at which the honey crystallises, each jar is unique. Large commercial honey brands will blend (or homogenise) honey from various sources for a consistent product from the first to last bottle. Dragonfly Meadow current does not and has no plan to move to a homogenised product. However, we may investigate producing some plant specific honey if we start to identify mass bloom times in the future. The main apiary is in an area with a high percentage of Jarrah trees, so Jarrah Honey batches may be a future opportunity.
Strained, not filtered: this means that trace amounts of pollen, propolis and wax remain in the honey, while any debris is removed. This process is not conducted under pressure or heat.
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After spinning out the honey it is placed in a stainless-steel double strainer and falls into the storage ready for bottling. In commercial beekeeping processes honey will be pumped through micro filters under pressure to remove any traces except for pollen in most cases. If a honey has not traces of pollen, the filtering needs to be extreme, and removing the pollen also removes all easily confirmed association with the origin of the honey. If a business is pressure filtering its honey, it will normally have to heat it to get the consistency needed to facilitate the process. Also, there is some general support for the idea that pollen and propolis have health benefits to the consumer.
Fresh from the field: We only produce small batches of honey, and while historians have stated that honey has been found in burial chambers that is edible after hundreds of years, everything changes in time, so we list the date of production against the Batch Number of your jar.
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Click here if you want to check the production date on your Dragonfly Meadow honey against its batch number.
Raw, Not Heated during processing: To allow us to provide the honey as close as possible to its natural state, including natural ‘enzymes’, the honey is hand processed. The closest the honey gets to being heated is a small burst with a hot air gun (3-5 seconds) to put the tamper proof seal in place on the jar.
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We only collect ‘ripe’ honey for processing, so not additional artificial drying is required. The wax capping is removed from the frame with an unheated knife. We then spin, strain and bottle our honey without introducing any heat in the process.
Transparent Farming: Dragonfly Meadow is being setup as a Permaculture / Regenerative style farm, and as we will not be participating in certification products like ‘Organic’, we will be sharing with you the factors in producing any product, so that our customers can decide for themselves if our methodology and approach aligns with their values.
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We will be adding information on how we came to our current model for beekeeping, which is always developing through practice and observation. However, the key points are that: we do not medicate our bees; and we only feed the bees if they are in danger of starving, not as part of increasing honey productions. Currently we only plan to run approximately 20 hives, and we will not be moving them to mono crops to provide pollination services. Future for the farm include planting a range or forage, meadow and productive trees with a mix of flowering times for the benefit of the farm and the bees.
