Tupelo Honey
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Florida Tupelo Honey is one of the rarest honeys with an exquisite buttery flavor and light color. Tuplelo trees thrive along the rivers and creeks of the Florida panhandle and have delicate fragrant blossoms that can produce wonderful tupelo honey crops. |
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| The Florida Tupelo flower is very delicate and blooms for only a very short time every year. Our beekeepers go through great lengths to keep our Florida tupelo honey pure by taking all the honey boxes off the hives and putting on clean empty beewax combs right as the first tupelo flowers bloom. After about two weeks of bloom, we go out and take the honey boxes off the hives and spin it out to get the rare tupelo honey. | |||
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The beekeepers take a break in the Tupelo beeyard. They are adding fresh boxes of honeycomb on the beehives in preparation for the Tupelo bloom. The blossoms generally open about the 20th of April in the Florida panhande. It is an event that even gets the most seasoned old timer in a frenzy of excitement as the time to collect the tupelo honey draws near. Beekeepers will spend hours talking about the signs of the impending Tupelo bloom, like the Kite-tailed hawk appearing, or the pecan blooms developing. |
We set our honeybees along the creeks and rivers where the floodwaters leave the banks and keep the roots of the Tupelo trees wet. Tupelo thrives along the Chipola, Appalachicola, and Choctahatchee River systems and produces the pollen that the bees use to make Tupelo honey. |
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Did you know that Tupelo honey does not granulate or sugar? It is because the fructose content is so high in relation to the glucose sugars. Beekeepers talk of "pure" Tupelo honey, but in reality, it's hard to keep those little bees from visiting just one floral source. When we say "pure" , we really mean "mostly pure". We spin out the honey in our new honeyhouse in the Vernon, Florida area. We have a 40 acre "bee farm" that we call the Lazy Bee Ranch. |
| The honeycombs to into the round spinners, or honey extractors that are in the background of this picture. Before the combs go into the centrifigal spinner, we remove the beeswax cappings, or coverings. All the Tupelo honey is stored in 55 gallon barrels until we put it into bottles. |  |
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