The taste of honey really depends on the nectar that the bees use to make it. Generally, the darker in color the honey is, the stronger the taste. By and large, a good batch of honey will be golden in color, not dark brown. Honey harvested from our garden contains no additives; it's all natural. Many commercially packaged honey products contain sugar water. Nutritionally, honey is virtually pure carbohydrate. It contains only trace amounts of other substances. The greatest nutritional attribute of honey is that it consists of simple sugars. These sugars do not need to be digested, but are assimilated directly by the body. This makes honey a quick energy source. There are dozens of uses for honey ranging from natural sweetener to wound dressing.

 

In the bee hive, the queen bee is kept below the upper boxes by a wire or plastic grid which the queen is too large to fit through. As the season progresses, the beekeeper adds more upper boxes until it's time to harvest the honey. A special one-way valve is then fitted in place of the grid and gradually all the bees are forced into the lowest part of the hive. The beekeeper can simply lift off the upper boxes containing the honey comb. The honey is extracted from the comb using centrifugal force in a machine called a "spinner", which looks much like an old fashioned upright spin dryer.