Did you know that the honey you pick off the shelves at Krinkel de Winkel is literally made just round the corner? No factory, no production line, no lorries travelling from far afield. Just a few beehives, Jack with his beekeeping kit, and loads of bees doing their very best amongst the trees around the ‘Buitenman’. We paid a visit to beekeeper Jack de Graaf to find out exactly how his honey ends up in our shop.
A surprise on the garden table
Jack had always loved honey, and when he retired, his wife, daughters and son had a surprise in store for him: a beekeeper’s suit and a beehive, all set up on the garden table. There was no escaping it now, so Jack became a beekeeper. His family were worried about the well-known ‘black hole’ that follows retirement, so they saw this as the perfect opportunity for Jack to start a new life as a beekeeper. A year later, he took a course, and that’s how the seed was sown.
Why it works so well to make honey here
The area around the ‘Buitenman’ actually turns out to be an ideal place for bees. Most people think that bees mainly visit flowers, but Jack explains that a tree is actually one big flower, and there are quite a few of them in this region. It starts in spring with the willows, and the lime tree is a major source of nectar here. But chestnut, maple and plane trees also play their part, even though, as a human, you hardly ever see a bee on them.
The result: a honey rich in herbs and full of variety, with each jar tasting slightly different depending on where the bees foraged for their food during that particular period.
Essential for nature
Bees, incidentally, do much more than just make honey. As they fly from tree to tree and from flower to flower in search of nectar and pollen, they pollinate the vast majority of the trees, shrubs and plants here in the local area along the way. Without that pollination, there would be no fruit, no seeds and no new generation of trees and plants. Wasps also play their part, by the way: they pollinate too, and also keep pests such as mosquitoes at bay. In short, all that buzzing amongst the hives here isn’t just good for a lovely jar of honey, but contributes in its own way to the whole landscape around the ‘Buitenman’.
No two jars are the same
Anyone who thinks that honey is just honey is mistaken. Among other things, Jack distinguishes between:
- Spring honey – darker in colour, spicy and rich in flavour, but also the honey that crystallises the quickest.
- Summer honey – a hybrid variety, depending on what is in bloom at the time.
- Linden honey – strikingly light in colour, with a milder flavour. This summer, one of Jack’s hives was situated right beneath a couple of enormous linden trees, so that batch could be safely labelled as genuine linden honey.
Incidentally, there is no such thing as ‘winter honey’, simply because nothing flowers in winter that can be harvested. Interestingly, honey that crystallises quickly is also given a new lease of life. Jack mixes new rapeseed honey with a jar from the previous year and stirs it twice a day for a few weeks. This creates creamed honey: soft, spreadable and no longer grainy. Also known as ‘children’s honey’, it’s perfect for spreading on bread, although grown-ups are just as keen to spread it on their pancakes instead of treacle.
From blossom to jar: honest and no-fuss
The production process at Jack’s takes no detours. The bees collect nectar and pollen, use them to fill their combs and seal the honey beneath a thin layer of wax. Jack removes the caps himself, the combs go into the extractor, and the honey flows through a coarse and a fine sieve into a bucket. From that bucket, it is poured straight into jars.
That’s all there is to it. No heating, no additives, no processing. “That’s all we do to it,” Jack adds matter-of-factly. That’s exactly what makes it what people nowadays like to call raw honey: straight from the local area, with tiny bits of wax and pollen still in it. Honey from the supermarket is often heated to extend its shelf life, but this causes the healthy enzymes to be lost. With Jack’s honey, all of that remains intact.
A by-product with a side effect: effective against hay fever
Here’s an interesting fact Jack shares: because his raw honey still contains tiny particles of pollen from the local area, many people swear by having a spoonful of this honey every day when hay fever season arrives. It’s not backed by scientific evidence, but it’s a story you often hear in the region.
A beekeeping colony as a small business
Incidentally, there’s actually quite a bit of work that goes into every jar of honey. Jack has to keep his colonies healthy, with their greatest enemy being the varroa mite – a tiny creature that burrows into the brood and spreads disease. He also keeps an eye on the temperature and space inside the hive, although bees seem to be very good at this themselves: they maintain a constant temperature of around 35 to 36 degrees around the brood, no matter how hot or cold it is outside.
And then there’s propolis, that sticky substance bees use to seal cracks in the hive and completely encase intruders. It has been used for centuries as a natural antibiotic; even the Russians are said to have treated wounds with it back in Napoleon’s time, long before penicillin existed.
Available at Krinkel de Winkel
The great thing is: Jack’s honey, including this season’s lime blossom honey, is available at Krinkel de Winkel, our farm shop here at the Buitenman. Pure, local and hassle-free – exactly how we like it here at the Buitenman. Will you be popping in soon to try a jar?