Raw Organic Fynbos Honey
Award Winner African Regional Competition 2023
100% raw, organic Fynbos honey. No heating, no preservatives, just pure honey.
500gm – R115
Out of stock
Meet the beautiful bee keepers from the West coast. Franscoise and Alma.
Here is a quick conversation we had with them about their honey
Is it Organic?
Yes it is all on western Cape fynbos and the closest commercial farm is about 10 km from where our bees are, the bees only fly maximum 3 km from their hives. Guaranteed organic we don’t do pollination , we only do honey. Pure honey.
How is it Raw
We take it out of our hive box , we take the surplus off, that is what we call it. The bottom portion of the hive is where we have the queen and the swarm, and all the other bees. The top section is where they make the honey, we take that off and replace that with empty ones and then we harvest again, after two or three weeks we swop it again. We use gravity to extract it with a machine, we extract all the honey, we de-cap it, normally when the moisture content is less then 18 percent, de-capping means making a small hole in the wax, to extract the honey, we extract the honey only and we put back the empty honeycomb, this allows the bees to start producing honey immediately again, otherwise it takes the bees 8 times longer to produce a kg of wax compared to honey so we actually helping the bees. The Honey passes through a normal stainless steel sieve and we put the honey in drums of 25kg.
Are the bees gentle with you?
Not at all, this time of the year ( June ) it is fine, the number of bees in the swarm is reduced to a quarter of the size so they are not very aggressive. In august, during flowering season then there are lot of bees. As soon as they get a lot of food and the queen is laying eggs and they start producing honey this increases the size of the swarm and then they become very aggressive. Obviously we always go into our fields with our kit.
How long have you been doing this?
We started in 2013, when my youngest son was still in university, he wanted some pocket money so we started with 5 hives and than another 5, then ten , then fifty and so on. And the rest is history.
Are you a member of the Western Cape beekeeping association.
Yes we are part of the WCBA.
We are not perfect, we are not the biggest but what I can tell you, in term of the quality we are aware and conscious about it all the time and we want to keep it small, i don’t want to get too big as then we need to employ other people etc. We are a family run operation. We also don’t buy in any other honey. We only use our own product. Then I know what we put in the market and can defend it. It is 99% proof but you get the odd little anomaly of odd wax getting through sometimes, that is part of it.