How Beekeepers Process Their Raw Honey
When the honey has been collected from the hive it has to be processed before it crystallises and becomes difficult to package, as well as prevent it looking hard and unappetising. Honey has to be heated to kill bacteria that can cause food poisoning. Ask about heating and health concerns affecting honey at your local beekeepers' association. Once the honey is processed and fit for its intended purpose, for eating or any of numerous other purposes, it can be packaged as a liquid or other format or added to other ingredients to suit your consumers' exact requirements.
So honey can be used for pouring onto fruit, or spread on toast, in the first case the beekeeper will want the honey to be runny and eject smoothly from a bottle or other pouring device. In the second case, for eating on toast or in sandwiches, the beekeeper may want to create honey both thick and thin to suit all tastes.
But honey is purchased by millions of people every day for more than just eating. Honey has recognised health and beauty benefits, and can be used in creams and liquids for smoothing onto the skin to keep it moist and help prevent acne spots from scarring, as well as for taking orally as a tonic or to treat various ailments such as indigestion and throat irritation.
Regardless of purpose, the beekeeper needs to abide by whatever rules apply to selling honey and advertising it as fit for specific uses. Those rules will vary according to purpose and the beekeeper will find the rules much more stringent for honey claimed to treat specific ailments, than for honey intended to beautify the skin. Check the rules with your local beekeeping association and include whatever disclaimers are required on the label of your packaging.
Most important of all, the beekeeper should aim to process honey of all different flavours - depending on flowers and plants from which bees take their nectar - also numerous different formats, for many very different end uses. That way the beekeeper really can make a very good living targeting buyers all over the world and requiring honey for a variety of reasons that will all prove popular and profitable.
