Honey: Raw and Unfiltered

Raw honey means that the honey has not been heated, or "Cooked" like you would cook and pasteurize your jam or jelly.  Honey does not need to be pasteurized to keep it healthy.  As a matter of fact, heating it destroys the health properties of the honey.  It's still sweet and yummy, just not healthy.  Which is the key to knowing how to buy your honey. 

The National Honey Board, an association of honey businesses. And the Board has decreed as follows: raw honey is “honey as it exists in the beehive or as obtained buy extraction, settling or straining without adding heat.”  Which means that raw unfiltered honey is honey as it exists in a beehive, period. If honey is ‘obtained by extraction, settling or straining without adding heat’ it will still be raw but it will not be unfiltered.

Then there's a lot a lot of talk about unfiltered honey.  If  we were to walk out to the hives right now and poke some cells we'd could eat raw unfiltered honey direct from the hive.  Of course the bees would not be very happy with us.  And, once we had the initial poke, we'd be sticky.  So sticky that wax and grass, and dust would start to stick to our hands and the honey.  Can you imagine pulling about100 frames of honey and transporting it to the honey house?  It gets messy.   So we need to filter honey just a bit.  Some people don't want any filtering with their honey.  This means bee legs and all!  Trust me, a little filtering may be necessary for a palatable product. 


It's easy for us to gravity filter our honey with a strainer over a five gallon bucket.  We just extract our honey (spin the honey out of the comb) then let  a stainless steel strainer do it's thing.  Bee legs gone, wax cappings out, all the goodness intact. 

It's the big bee yards who can not do this.  They have so much honey, they need to process it faster.  Some are so big, they process really fast.  If you buy bottled honey in most grocery stores, it's supplied by a large bee farm with huge extractors. They also warm up the honey to get it from hive to bottle faster and more efficiently.  That's the kicker.  If they heat it over 120 degrees, they destroy the health benefits.  Then it becomes a nice sweet treat but not a medicinal food product.

Heated honey is sought after at most grocery stores.  Heated honey will not crystallize.  Crystals are a normal development in honey.  The heat kills the live particles, and thus prevents crystallization.  Stores like long shelf life of products that look good.  A big bottled of firm honey doesn't look good.  So most honey in the main aisles is heated-filtered honey.

Some major chains even bulk cheap heated honey from China, where they pump sugar feeds and high fructose corn syrup to the bees as food so they regurgitate it back as honey syrup.  It's cheap, not really honey, and won't crystallize.  It is usually very clear, thin and sloshes around in the bottle.  Real honey will make a bubble, one bubble so when you flip your bottle over it will slowly go to the top.  Try this next time you're in the "Jelly aisle" and see some cheap honey.  Read this for a honey reality:  Chinese Honey ggland Asian Honey Smuggling

I'm sure by now you're trying to figure out what to do to ensure you get raw unfiltered honey.  Look for the health foods section.  Most raw or local, small dealer honey is in the health department.  It's not packed fast, or efficiently, and usually costs more.  We are just one small producer in our area with raw unfiltered honey.  There are others who sell locally as well at stores like Grown N Gathered of Quincy, both HyVee stores in Quincy and  US Wellness Meats in Canton.  All of us work together to supply the customers with the best, and healthiest honey.