Product of the month (January 2024)

Honey

In Ostrobothnia, several beekeepers refine and sell this sweet and flavorful product. There are many different types of honey, and their characteristics – taste, color, scent, and texture – vary according to the origin of the plants. Often, honey is sorted based on its consistency, which is the most crucial factor when consumers make their purchasing decisions.

On the farmshop map, you can find beekeepers like Marcs Gård and Malax Honey, as well as several other farmshop entrepreneurs who sell honey products.

How is honey made?

Bees collect nectar from flowers during the summer and transport it to the hive. In one go, they can transport about 0.1 g of nectar in their nectar bladder. The nectar source is chosen carefully, as bees also have their favorite flowers. In Finland, the main sources of honey are raspberries, clover, fireweed, oil crops, fruit trees, and forest flowers such as lingonberries.

Plants attract bees using so-called nectar guides. When flowers are full of nectar, the guides are clearly visible. Sometimes humans can see them as stripes on the petals, but they are usually not visible to the human eye because UV light is needed to see them, and bees can see it but not humans. When the nectar is sucked away, the nectar guides disappear. Bees also emit pheromones when sucking up nectar from the flower, conveying to other bees that it is not worthwhile to visit that flower for a while.

Honey ripens in the wax cells

When bees return to the hive, they transfer the nectar to a house bee, called nectar conversion, for further processing. In this process, enzymes from the bees' saliva are mixed into the nectar, and the sugars are broken down into the simple sugars, fructose, and glucose, that honey mostly consists of. Bees then fan away the water from the nectar to get a concentrated sugar product that can be stored for a long time without spoiling. When they place the honey inside the wax cells in the beehive and cover it with a wax seal, it is ready honey.

The beekeeper extracts the honey

At the end of summer, the beekeeper removes the filled honeycombs from the hive to extract them. The main harvest of honey in Finland takes place in the period between July and August. However, some plants, such as buckwheat and heather, still bloom after this.

Before the wax combs can be extracted, the beekeeper removes the wax caps from the honey frames with an uncapping fork or uncapping machine. After that, the combs are placed in a centrifuge that, through centrifugal force, removes the honey from the cells. After extraction, the honey should be freed from wax residues and other particles, either by letting the honey flow through a sieve or by allowing it to clarify without sieving it first. In the latter case, wax particles rise to the surface and are then easy to remove with the help of a butter paper or ladle. Newly extracted honey crystallizes over time and often becomes coarse-grained and hard if it is not regularly stirred or seeded. A soft, fine-crystallized honey is obtained through regular stirring or seeding. When the honey's color begins to lighten, it gets a pearlescent sheen, and then the honey is ready for bottling.

It is essential that the beneficial enzymes of honey are not destroyed during honey treatment. The best is to extract and bottle the honey as it comes in, but if that is not possible, the beekeeper can gently heat the extracted stored honey so that it can be bottled. The most heat-sensitive enzymes begin to be destroyed at 40 degrees Celsius. Therefore, it is essential to ensure that the quality of honey is kept high at all times and to use as little heat as possible.

One can also enjoy the honey directly after extraction. However, it does not stay liquid for a particularly long time. Finnish honey crystallizes sooner or later. How quickly it crystallizes depends on the ratio between glucose and fructose. The higher the glucose content, the faster the honey crystallizes. One can also eat honey directly from the combs.

How honey is treated and the quality of Finnish honey is governed in Finland by honey regulations. 

Source: www.hunaja.net