Journal · Honey · by Laszlo Kun
Why our honey tastes of where it comes from
Two jars from the same season, both raw, both ours — and they can taste noticeably different. The reason is the most honest thing about real honey: it tastes of where the bees were.
Honey is a map of the landscape
A bee forages within a few kilometres of her hive. Whatever is flowering in that radius — the street trees, the bush, the backyard gardens, the remnant eucalypts — is what ends up in the jar. So the honey from a hive in one suburb carries a different signature from a hive a few suburbs over, because the bees are working a different set of flowers.
This is what “single-origin” means for honey. Rather than blending everything together into one uniform product, we keep honey from different apiaries separate, so each one keeps the character of its own patch of South East Melbourne.
Our five honey regions
Our honey comes from five areas across South East Melbourne, each with its own landscape and its own forage:
- Berwick — our home base, a mix of suburban gardens and remnant trees.
- Harkaway — leafier and more elevated, with established gardens and bush.
- Narre Warren East — a semi-rural fringe with a broad spread of forage.
- Belgrave South — cooler and greener, on the edge of the Dandenongs’ influence.
- Beaconsfield Upper — hilly country with its own distinct flora.
Same bees, same chemical-free care, and all of it raw — but a different surrounding landscape, and so a different honey.
Why we keep it raw
Whatever the region, we do as little to the honey as possible — because the less that’s done to it, the more of the original it keeps. Raw honey is simply honey as the bees made it: not heated to high temperatures, not finely filtered to strip out the natural traces of pollen and propolis that give it its character and goodness.
A lot of supermarket honey is heat-treated and ultra-filtered so it stays clear and pourable on a shelf for years. That processing also flattens the flavour and removes much of what makes honey honey. We’d rather it crystallised naturally on your bench (a sign it’s raw, not a fault) than strip out the character and goodness that make raw honey what it is.
Tasting the difference
If you’ve only ever had blended, processed honey, single-origin raw honey is a small revelation — not because of anything we add, but because of everything we don’t take away. The character is already there, put in by the bees and the landscape. Our job is just to not get in the way of it.
If you’d like to taste what your own corner of South East Melbourne produces, you can read about each of our five honey regions and choose honey from the apiary nearest you.