Honey Update – The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

The kind folks who are signed-up to receive our emails found out recently that The Grass-fed Homestead is hosting honey bees for a commercial bee-keeper for the second year now.  My bee-keeping friend loves our location because of all our knapweed.  I did not know until last year that knapweed nectar, when harvested by bees, makes the most premium honey on the planet. If you’ve watched our videos for long, you know we have some serious knapweed here!

I’ve introduced my friend to numerous other farmers and homesteaders in the area (some of whom you are familiar with) such as Tess from Bah Bah Blacktail Farm, Rob & Molly from Amiable Acres, John from the Sheppard Ranch, Beth from Cable Creek Farm, to name a few.  With all that honey available from such excellent sources, I thought it would be awesome to offer you, the viewers, a small piece of our homestead (and our friends’ farms) by selling north Idaho knapweed honey and making it available to ship across the US!

The Good:  I asked for feedback from our email subscribers and the response was quite favorable.  I heard from a lot of people that would love to get some north Idaho Knapweed Honey so I decided to move forward with making the honey available.

The Bad: My bee-keeper friend sold out of the knapweed honey.  Ughh! Really bad timing.  He does have orange blossom honey though.  I know, it’s not north Idaho honey BUT this orange blossom honey is amazing.  He gave me a sample of it and it is tied for first place (in my opinion) with knapweed honey.  It is THAT good.

I thought I would take a chance on the orange blossom honey.  I received a small amount of it that I’m going to make available for sale very shortly.  Hopefully, there is still interest in the honey (even though it is from California and not Idaho).  If things go well, I will definitely acquire the Idaho knapweed honey for you guys this fall which is when the next harvest will be.

The Ugly: The biggest hold up in this process has been trying to figure out shipping options.  I have been shopping around for the best deal on shipping to keep costs as low as possible for you guys but the options weren’t great.  The best I could find was USPS flat rate priority mail.  The small box (which is around $7) is too small to fit a pint jar of honey.  The next box can fit six pints in it but it costs almost $14.  I’m trying to find out more about a UPS commercial account to see what pricing I can get there but in the meantime, if you know of a more competitive shipping option, please let me know.

I plan to open cart VERY SOON on the very limited supply of orange blossom honey I have.  Though I will ship a single pint, it would probably make more sense to order a few pints since the shipping cost will be the same up to six pints (unless I can find a better shipping rate).  I’d love to hear from you guys… are you interested in the orange blossom?