Our Process
Based at Lake Eacham on the Atherton Tablelands, Tommybee Apiaries strives to operate as environmentally cohesively as possible, their bees living in harmony with the native bushland of the Tablelands. The taste and colour of the honey reflects the season and what their bees forage on.
It is this process, allowing the bees to eat what is available to them at different times of the year, that results in unique tasting, premium honey. Some floral sources, such as eucalyptus only flower every three years or when triggered by environmental conditions, making some blends extra special when they are produced.
Tommybee Apiaries do not treat their hives with harsh chemicals and there is no commercial farming in the vicinity of their foraging bees, so you know that you are eating the purest, healthiest honey available. Additionally, honey is only removed when the bees have enough to spare, limiting the impact that the process has on them.
The bottling process is also undertaken with the bee’s best interests at heart, harvesting in small batches and bottled by hand. Tommybee’s apiary sites are limited to 50 hives, giving strong biosecurity and management power to best look after the bees. Gravity is the only filtering method the team uses, so the honey generally comes with a higher level of pollen, as well as trace elements of propolis and beeswax. Additionally, this means that the honey has greater health properties than store-bought honey, but will crystalise faster.
All Tommybee Apiaries honey is single-origin, meaning that each jar worth of honey can be traced back to a single hive. This is indicated on each jar/bottle. All facets of the Tommybee operation are completed in a manner to ensure that these batch numbers remain accurate throughout the production process- from moving hives through to extraction. This means that all honey arrives at our extraction facility in its single origin form, keeping the rest of the process simple. From here, honey is extracted using the centrifugal extractors and cold pressing screws to process the capping derived from the frames, before they are spun.
The next step in the process involves taking the single origin honey directly from the settling tank, noting it’s extraction date and origin and placing it in storage specific to that information. Therefore, each jar can be considered not only single-origin but single-date too.