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Organic Palm Blossom Honey
12-oz. jar, $12.
Our honeybee colonies here at Steelgrass gather nectar from hundreds of varieties of trees and flowering plants that grow on the Farm, but our palm trees, which blossom year-round, are their favorites.
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Our honeybees are especially fond of a palm native to Australia called the Fox-Tail, named after the bushy appearance of its fronds, and they also like the flowers of our coconut, triangle, and dwarf date palms.
Another favorite is the giant Albesia tree in our Farm's "Meadow of the Dreadful Invaders." Part of the reason for the success of this fast-growing, island-gobbling invasive species is the fact that it bears seeds as often as three times a year, and when it's in flower, bees come from miles around to join our bees in gorging on the nectar. (Like many alien species in Hawaii, including the orange-flowered African Tulip, the Albesia also happens to be strikingly handsome. This was especially evident when Hollywood actor Ben Stiller stood next to our tree last year, while making a short film about the animated feature "Madagascar 2" here on the Farm.)
Other stops on the bees' nectar menu are weed trees such as Java Plum, Christmasberry, and Guava. Although we were careful to remove most of these from the Farm, we retained a few specifically because of their attractiveness to bees and other pollinators. In addition to the traditional pink-fleshed guava, which is mainly used for juice, we also have a few clumps of the smaller, red Strawberry Guava.
Not everything on the Farm that flowers provides food for bees, however. Most plants in the ginger and heliconia families, despite their bright colors, don't produce nectar in a form that appeals to honeybees. And the blossoms on some of our flowering fruit trees, such as the Soursop and Starfruit, are too small to be of much interest to them as nectar sources. This is also true of cacao trees, whose tiny blossoms are pollinated not by honeybees, but by midges and gnats.
Kauai is fortunate to be free from the disease and colony collapse problems that have ravaged bees not just in the United States, but throughout the world. As a result, Kauai beekeepers don't have to use chemicals such as miticides or medications to keep our hives healthy. Added to the fact that we use no chemical pesticides or fertilizers on the Farm, this makes the honey we produce as close to truly organic as you can find anywhere.
Because our bees feed on different flowers as the blooming seasons change, there are slight variations in both the color and flavor of the honey they make. We don our bee suits to remove honeycomb from our hives every few months, and often notice these color differences even in the raw comb. From here, the honey is separated from the beeswax via centrifugal force in a hand-cranked device called a honey extractor, then filtered and bottled. As a general rule, the darker the honey, the more pronounced the flavor.
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