Family-Owned & Operated Honey Farm in Starke, Florida
Our Raw Honey
We personally handle our honey from the hive to container. After extraction, we begin by letting our honey filter naturally with gravity. Meaning, we allow the honey to "rest" in the first stainless steel tank for a short time where the wax and large particles will float to the top. At this time the wax cappings can be skimmed off the top and put into our wax press to start the processing of our natural beeswax product. We then pump the honey from the bottom of the extracting tank into our stainless steel filling tank where once again the honey can "rest" and naturally filter a second time with gravity. We do not micro filter our honey. From this point the honey can be filled into drums, buckets, or other containers from the valve at the bottom of the tank. Occasionally we do use a large stainless mesh to strain out any remaining large bee/wax particles if needed. We have found this procedure to be very successful and produces beautiful honey that still maintains its natural raw status.
From time to time, you may see very fine particles including pollen particles within the honey. That is a normal occurrence and actually we want to keep the pollen within the honey as much as possible as the pollen provides nutritional value to those who eat the honey and identifies the honey as being pure, raw and not adulterated. We never add any color, flavor, or dilute any of our honey. We do not pasteurize our honey. As needed and during the cooler months we will warm our filling tank to aprox 95 degrees F, which is the natural temperature the bees keep within their hive. This helps the honey to naturally filter and flow well during filling. Several times we have voluntarily allowed our honey to be tested by the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services for chemical residue analysis in which hundreds of chemicals were tested. Each time, the reports returned back showing “none detected”. We are very proud of that!
All raw honey (fresh from the beehive) will granulate (get cloudy and thick) in time. This is natural, and does not mean the honey has "gone bad", as honey does not spoil. We recommend NOT heating it in boiling water to prevent the loss of flavor, enzymes, and nutritional benefits. Heat a pot of water up to a temperature between 95°F and 110°F. Remove the pan from the heat source and then place your jars of honey into the hot water. Let the water cool until it reaches room temperature and check your honey. If there is any crystallization left, you will need to continue to repeat the process until the honey is crystal free.
Uses & Facts About Pure Honey
- Raw honey has many, many health benefits with dozens of scientific studies to back them up. Check out the research yourself and talk to your health care professional about the benefits.
- Raw honey is liquid when bottled. Within weeks, it could become crystallized at room temperature and it often looks murky or milky. This does not mean the honey has gone bad. Different floral varieties crystallize at different speeds and a few non at all.
- Raw honey contains small amounts of natural bee pollen, royal jelly, propolis and beeswax, the benefits are plentiful.
- To produce a single pound of honey, a colony of bees must collect nectar from approximately 2 million flowers and fly over 55,000 miles.
- On average, a honey bee produces 1/12 of a teaspoon of honey over the course of its life. To put that into perspective, two tablespoons of honey would be enough to fuel a bee’s entire flight around the world.
- Honey’s depth of flavor is determined by the source of the nectar it was made from. The darkness or lightness of certain honey as well as the fragrance varies as well.
- The environment depends on the pollination that occurs when honey bees gather nectar. Bees pollinate $20 billion worth of U.S. crops each year, and approximately one third of all food eaten by Americans is either directly or indirectly derived from honey bee pollination.
- Honey contains enzymes that help your body digest food, which in turn, helps keep our immune systems working properly. Honey is also a healthy alternative to giving yourself that energy boost when you need it!
- Honey is also used in many skin and hair care health products.
Uses & Facts About Pure Beeswax
Beeswax can be utilized in making lip balm, lip gloss, hand creams, healing salves, mustache wax, hair pomades, and moisturizers; add your own essential oils to make your own custom products. Pure beeswax carries antiviral, anti-inflammatory, and antibacterial properties that are essential in fighting chapped skin and bacterial infections that tend to affect us most in the dry, winter months. It also forms a protective barrier by sealing moisture in our skin without smothering and clogging up the pores. Candle making has long involved the use of beeswax. Beeswax candles are often superior to other wax candles because they are meant to burn cleaner, brighter, longer, and don’t bend. Beeswax also smells great when burned without any added chemicals or scents as it’s naturally aromatic from the honey and flower nectar. You can add essential oils if you choose to customize your scent, but not required. Beeswax never goes bad and can be heated and reused.
Our Pure Beeswax
Our pure beeswax in Florida is handled by hand from frame to block! Due to this being a raw natural product made by the bees, we take care in handling our wax very carefully. We ensure that you are getting the best, most clean pure beeswax possible. At times, and rare, there could be a few ultra fine impurities seen in the wax that could not be removed throughout our exclusive Townsend Honey Farm custom melting and filtering process, that is the nature of this raw honey in Florida which is a pure product. During the final processing stage, we filter our wax through very ultra-fine stainless mesh 4 times to achieve a beautiful clean wax. We never bleach, add color, dilute or add scent to any of our raw wax. It is just as the bees make it. With that being said, be advised that just has honey can vary in color and floral intensity during each nectar flow, so can the wax itself. You will see our wax as a very light yellow to golden, throughout the year, never brown! We never heat our wax over 200 degrees F during our entire processing, we also never boil our wax and never boil our wax in water.
Beeswax, unlike pollen, propolis, and honey, is not collected from or derived from plants but is made by honey bees. Sugars found in collected nectar are converted by the honey bees into beeswax. New wax is formed by the worker bees. Honeybees consume honey and pollen to produce the wax. Initially, the wax is glass-clear and colorless, becoming opaque after mastication and adulteration with pollen by the hive worker bees. The wax becomes progressively more yellow by the incorporation of pollen oils and propolis which gives it the natural color. It takes about eight pounds of honey to produce just one pound of beeswax. Since it comes directly from bees and is non-toxic, beeswax is completely environmentally friendly and an important ingredient in a range of eco-friendly products.
This natural product can not be duplicated by man. Beeswax has a long history of use in everyday products. The single largest consumer of beeswax in the United States is the cosmetics industry. The candle industry is another very popular consumer. Beeswax can also be found in the pharmaceutical and dental industries, floor and furniture polish, crayons, candy, chewing gum, ski wax, art, leather, and fabric weatherproofing, and in many other well-known products.
