Frequently Asked Questions
The management team at Wendell Estate and Wendell Honey Farm has 200+ years of combined honey and beekeeping experience, also including an MD degree among other science and health backgrounds. Send us your questions on honey, beekeeping and health and we’ll do our best to answer them! Any questions that lead to a FAQ post will earn the submitter a coupon for 20% off their next order from our estore (up to $49 savings).
General Raw Honey Questions
Soft-set honey is honey that has been allowed to crystallize under controlled conditions so that it is smoother, softer, and more spreadable than the hard solid that most natural liquid honeys gradually transition to over months. It’s also often called creamed honey. More details on soft-set and creamed honey here.
Honey in general is more expensive than processed sugars due to its higher production costs, and more limited global availability. Raw honey tends to be even more expensive than processed honey. This is partly due to higher honey quality required to successfully sell honey as raw honey and also the decreased costs of industrial-style packaging of processed honeys. Processed honeys are more easily adulterated with cheaper sugar syrups, a fraudulent practice than can lower competitive pricing. More details on cost of raw versus processed honey in this post.
This is a common question answered in many places online. Unfortunately, most of the answers miss the mark in some way or another.
Raw honey is a remarkably safe food that never spoils in a way such that it becomes harmful to eat. However, raw honey does lose freshness, flavor and health benefits over time.
Raw honey can ferment over time when exposed to moisture in the air. If you want your raw honey to remain fresh and tasty for more than a couple months, proper storage is important.
Raw honey is about 80% natural sugars, so if you have diabetes, it’s important to monitor your blood glucose in relation to honey. However, research shows that raw honey does not cause the dramatic spike in insulin and blood glucose that processed sugars do. Raw honey is better tolerated by diabetics that refined sugars.
If you don’t have diabetes, eating raw honey, especially if it replaces processed sugars in your diet, decreases your chances of developing diabetes, which is a leading cause of morbidity and contributor to mortality in North America.
Eating raw honey has some immune-modulating effects, but it’s unlikely that eating local honey, even if it is raw, will noticeably improve your seasonal allergies. Science of raw honey and hay fever here.
Many people choose organic foods to reduce risks of possible unhealthy contamination with unhealthy substances and/or to encourage sustainable agricultural practices for environmental reasons. Legitimate organically certified honey may have decreased likelihood of contamination with certain substances when compared to regular, uncertified honey. However, the benefits of choosing organic honey are much less significant and clear than with other foods. There are clear instances where domestic raw non-organic honey is a healthier choice than “organic” honey imported from countries with less rigorous organic certification practices, and higher rates of misuse of hazardous agricultural chemicals. For health benefits, whether the honey is raw or processed is a larger factor than whether it’s organic or not: Eating non-organic raw honey confers more health benefits than eating pasteurized or highly processed organic honey.
USDA-certified “Organic” Honey is a very complex issue. Ideally it means that the honey meets the National Organic Program definition of honey produced on apiaries that meet its standards of organic in terms of both beekeeping practices and floral source of the nectar the bees forage. Many would be surprised to learn that due to controversy and complexity inherent in honey and organic certification, this means virtually all USDA Organic honey is imported, and not produced in USA.
An important question when you consider:
- The health benefits of raw honey are superior to honey that has been heated or pasteurized.
- You’re likely paying more for raw honey than “regular” (processed) honey.
- One of the largest brands of raw honey in the USA faced a class action lawsuit accusing them of falsely labeling honey as “raw” when it wasn’t. (The case was dropped after a settlement paid.)
Unfortunately, there’s no easy way for a consumer to tell if their raw honey is truly raw. Honey “raw-ness” or freshness can be measured in specialty food laboratories with raw honey having a 5-hydroxymethylfurfural (HFM) level of <15 mg/kg (this test was done on the honey mentioned in the lawsuit, which showed that the honey had been heated).
If you are quite a honey connoisseur, you may be able to detect honey that’s been heated or pasteurized by the flavor, as heating honey does change the flavor.
For regular consumers, we can only suggest buying raw honey that you trust. If you have the luxury of buying directly from the producer that should increase the chance that you get real raw honey. If you buy raw honey directly from us on our website, we guarantee you will receive fresh, raw honey (HMF levels of our honey have never reached even 1.0 mg/kg on any of the many times a sample has been tested).
Yes! Raw honey has been used as a topical treatment for skin and wounds for millennia.
According to dermatologists, raw honey skin treatments can help keep the skin young and prevent wrinkles. Emollient, soothing, humectant and hair conditioning effects are all known beneficial effects when raw honey is applied to skin and/or hair. Raw honey has been used as a treatment of psoriasis, acne, seborrhea, dandruff, pityriasis, tinea (a fungal infection), and diaper dermatitis.
Though specific honeys like manuka and tualang are best for making heat-sterilized medical wound dressings, any raw honey has comparable properties to manuka for skin treatments.
Infants less than 1 year of age should not eat any honey, raw or pasteurized. Though raw honey has potent anti-bacterial properties, there’s one type of bacterium (Clostridium botulinum), that can escape being killed by the honey by going dormant as an incredibly resistant spore. Though these spores are harmless to anybody older than a year of age, infants less than a year of age are at risk of developing infant botulism (a rare and serious, but curable illness) if they consume these spores. C. botulinum spores are ubiquitous in nature and may be found in honey.
Note that the C. botulinum spores are unaffected by honey pasteurization: These incredible bacterial “emergency survival pods” easily survive pasteurization which is done to kill the harmless (and less hardy) naturally occurring yeasts. Adults and older children are completely unaffected if they consume these spores. C. botulinum spores cannot cause food-borne (regular) botulism that used to be rather commonly caused by spoiled canned foods. Food-borne botulism is caused by a toxin formed by metabolically active (i.e. not dormant spores of) C. botulinum bacteria and cannot be gotten from raw honey.
If you can eat pasteurized honey, you can eat raw honey. Raw honey is one of the safest natural foods there is. Unlike other raw foods like dairy products or raw meat, you can’t get infections or food poisoning from raw honey. This post has a detailed explanation of raw honey’s safety in pregnancy.
That’s a tough question! We like to think that our honey can hold its own against other excellent honeys from around the world. Wendell Estate Honey is the only honey from North America to to win at both the World Beekeeping Awards (the industry’s most prestigious competitive awards) and get the top Platinum Award at the London International Honey Awards. That being said, “best honey” is a matter of personal preference, and we wouldn’t be so bold as to claim that our honey is the best. We often enjoy different honeys from across Canada and around the world, and encourage you to do the same. We encourage you to purchase real, pure, raw honey. Buying from a trusted producer is always a good choice. We invite you to try our honey and see for yourself how it compares with other honeys you’ve tried.
This is a major issue, especially with cheaper honeys. Honey is the 3rd most adulterated food globally. As this shocking study showed over a decade ago, a lot of honey on the store shelves isn’t pure honey. In the years since, repeat credible reports like this one show the issue hasn’t gone away.
Unfortunately, it’s extremely difficult for a consumer to detect whether honey has been adulterated. There are many “DIY home tests” for authenticity of honey circulating on the internet, but none that I know of are reliable. I intend to perform these tests on a sample of honey that I know to be pure (easy for me) and perhaps on samples that i know to be adulterated (more difficult) and post the results.
For now we only recommend that you buy your honey from a trustworthy source. I discuss honey adulteration a bit more in this post.
Wendell Estate Honey FAQ
One of the hallmarks of Wendell Estate Honey is its brilliant white color. Some customers have asked us what we add to the honey to make it so white. We can’t emphasize enough that we add absolutely nothing to our natural honey: the white color is entirely natural. I’ve expanded the explanation of why our honey is so white in this post.
Only Manuka honey has a UMF rating as only Manuka is known to contain methyl glyoxal (MGO), an organic compound which has anti-bacterial properties. UMF is a term invented by manuka marketers and reflects the MGO content of the honey. Containing MGO means that Manuka honey can be sterilized by heat and still retain strong antibiotic properties, making it the ideal honey for sterilized medical-grade wound dressings. It is worth noting that ALL raw honey has anti-bacterial properties similar to manuka, but most raw honeys lose these antibiotic properties when heated. Perhaps also relevant is that if you’re eating the honey (as opposed to using it for sterilized wound dressings), the health benefits claimed by manuka honey are simply the health benefits of eating any raw honey. Sterilized or pasteurized manuka honey will have diminished health benefits compared to any raw honey, as most health benefits are completely unrelated to MGO, and decrease with increasing heat exposure. Adulterated or fake manuka honey will obviously have decreased health benefits compared to authentic raw honey (this report found that as much as 80% of manuka honey sold may be fake).
Every drop of the original WEH is harvested from our honey farm and then packaged fresh on location immediately after extracting the honey from the honeycomb. Nothing is added and nothing is removed from the honey. It naturally micro-crystallizes (granulates) in the jar. No honey from any other farm is used for WEH (original).
In 2018 we partnered with friends of ours that have their own honey farm in a remote area of Saskatchewan to offer Wendell Estate Organic Honey. Every drop of WEH Organic comes from their farm. We coordinate closely with them to pick up their organic honey from their farm and package it fresh on our farm. We never mix the honey from the two farms.
The obvious difference between the original and the organic honey, aside from the farm it comes from, is the Canadian Organic Regime (COR) certification. There are strict regulations about organic beekeeping. (More details on organic certification of honey in this blog, and an update specific to USDA Organic honey certification here). However, meeting these conditions does not alone qualify the honey as organic. Bees forage where they will, flying up to several kilometers to find nectar. COR regulations state that no prohibited substances can be present within a 3 km radius of the beehives. On the flat prairies, a 3km radius could include all or part of 56 or more quarter-section fields! The crops and farming practices on any one of these fields can exclude the honey from organic certification, whether the bees actually gathered nectar from that field or not. The largest qualification for organic certification of honey – the agricultural practices in the surrounding area – are completely out of the beekeeper’s control. This is one main reason why authentic COR-certified organic honey is so rare.
In Canada, not all organic honeys are equal. Closer scrutiny reveals that many Canadian brands of organic honey import their organic honey, with Brazil being a common supplier of organic honey. Without getting into differences of organic certification and rigor between different countries, it is worth noting that organic honey from Brazil fetches a lower price on the global market than non-organic Canadian honey. Unfortunately, like almost any certification, there are also Canadian organic certifying agencies (for profit companies) that sacrifice rigor and validity for profit: some “organic†honey producers in Canada certainly don’t meet the COR criteria. For Wendell Estate Organic Honey, both the producing farm and our packaging facilities are certified by Procert, one of the most rigorous and reliable organic certification companies in Canada.
Another factor worth paying attention to is whether the honey is raw and unfiltered or processed. Real, raw, unfiltered, unprocessed non-COR-certified honey will confer more health benefits than organic-certified honey that has been pasteurized and ultra-filtered.
As for the honey itself, WEH and WEH Organic are very similar. Both have a similar white colors, silky-smooth textures and delicate fresh flavors. Both are pure, entirely natural, additive- and antibiotic-free, completely raw, unheated and unfiltered prairie-blossom honey: Sweet healthy goodness! We invite you to try both of our honeys and choose for yourself.
Note: due to limited availability, we do not offer WEH Organic honey for sale directly from our website. If you would like to order WEH Organic honey, please email us at info@wendellestate.ca.
If your honey is at room temperature and seems a little too hard, disturb or stir it with a spoon or a knife and it should become more spreadable. Here’s a quick demonstration (click). You can also warm the honey gently in warm water (25-30°C or 77-86°F). Unless you intend use all the honey as liquid, be careful not to melt the honey into a liquid, which occurs at around 35°C (95°F) depending how long the honey is exposed to the heat (details here).
How long your raw honey will keep fresh and delicious depends entirely on how you store it. The Canadian government does not require either a “Best Before” date or an “expiry” date on honey and we do not label our domestic honey with either of these dates. Raw honey can keep indefinitely if stored properly. However under sub-optimal conditions (warm/hot and humid), raw honey can ferment within weeks. Please see our storage instructions (here) for a detailed discussion on raw honey storage. There’s more details on honey shelf-life, freshness and aging in this article.
We don’t batch or blend our honey, so the color depends on many factors. All of our Wendell Estate Honey is naturally a very light, almost white color, with small variations. However, if stored in a warm environment, over time (weeks to months depending on the temperature) the color will darken. The honey will retain its white color for many months in the refrigerator and years (to indefinitely) in the freezer. While honey does lose some health benefits and flavor as it ages, it’s perfectly fine to eat honey that’s darkened slightly over months in the kitchen (it won’t be different in age from the average honey purchased from the store shelf). Darkened honey that hasn’t fermented is still great for baking, since you’ll be cooking the honey anyway.
Yes, you can certainly re-freeze your soft-set honey after opening the jar, or at any time. If you eat your honey quite slowly and don’t expect to finish the jar within two or three months, then keeping the amount you expect to eat in a couple months at room temperature in your kitchen or pantry, while freezing the rest is a great way to keep your honey fresh, delicious and preserve the maximum health benefits. Unlike, say, meat or fish, you can freeze the honey and warm it to room temperature as many times as needed without damaging the honey in any way. If you purchase directly from our estore, that can allow you to save money by buying larger amounts of honey than you normally would consume in a few months.
I should just mention that if the honey has melted into a liquid form, whether you freeze it or not it will re-crystallize into a harder, more granular form, losing the Wendell Estate Honey signature smooth texture. Our soft-set honey becomes liquid when it is exposed to temperatures above about 30 C for long enough (I can’t give precise times for the melting process: It depends on the exact temperature). You can read details about honey shelf-life, freshnes, and aging here.
If you are ordering from our website, all shipping to USA and Canada is included. The price you see is the price you pay to receive your gourmet raw honey to your address.
For wholesale orders we will provide a shipping quote for you. All upcharges by the freight company are the responsibility of the customer.
With all the fake and adulterated honey in the market (honey is the 3rd most adulterated food in the world!), it’s no wonder some customers are vigilant!
Fortunately, we have not yet seen a WEH-branded jar of knock-off honey, but please get in touch with us if you think you have a fake jar of WEH.
We, at Wendell Estate honey, offer you prairie honey, as it is, straight from the beehive to you.
We do not mix or batch our honey. We take the honey from the beehive, extract it from the honey comb, spin and strain off the wax, and get it into jars.  It is a living, straight-from-the-farm food so will have some variance from lot to lot and from year to year. If your honey is at room temperature and seems a little firm, disturb or stir it with a spoon or a knife and it should become more spreadable. Here’s a quick demonstration. You can also warm the honey gently in warm water (25-30°C: 77-86°F). Unless you will use all the honey as liquid, be careful not to melt the honey into a liquid, which occurs at around 35°C (95°F) depending how long the honey is exposed to the heat.
As explained above, we generally do not put best before dates on our jars, especially the jars intended for sale in Canada or the United States. However, some North American customers have occasionally received a jar that does have a best before date on the jar and ask why. Some North American retailers of our premium raw honey also require us to put a best before date on the jars
In the Canadian market, honey is not required to have a best before date. When we export our honey to some countries we are required to put a best before date on the jar. Sometimes we over-print for a particular order and those jars may be shipped to domestic customers. The best before date is only valid if storage conditions are strictly adhered to. You can read detailed storage instructions for soft-set raw honey here.
Some of our larger offline retailers require us to put a best before date on the honey that we ship to them as per their own policy. As explained above, this date has no real meaning. Please store your raw honey appropriately. If it turns dark, loses its fresh flavor or ferments, it’s up to you whether you continue to use it: It won’t hurt you, but it may not taste the same as when it was fresh.
Wendell Estate Honey is strained to organic standards so may have small pieces of beeswax, clumps of bee pollen or propolis. Bee pollen is healthy: it is collected from flowers and contains natural vitamins, proteins and minerals. Bee propolis is made by bees from tree and plant resins (black poplar in our area) and used as a glue by bees to strengthen their hives and plug drafty holes. Propolis is commonly collected, sold and eaten as a health supplement. Beeswax simply passes harmlessly through your body without being digested.Â
Absolutely! This was an important factor for us in choosing our jars and jar suppliers. As rural agriculturalists that spend much of our time in nature, sustainability and protection of the natural environment is of paramount importance to us.
Both our glass jars and our PET 1kg (2.2lb) jars should be readily recyclable by your local recycling program. Please do not send us your used jars. As a small, farm-run company Wendell Estate Honey does not its own have recycling facilities: We would simply have to deposit them with our local recycling program.
Our office manager, Ashley, “upcycles” used Wendell Estate Honey jars into her beautiful Moonflower beeswax candles, made with pure beeswax from our farm.
Because of the quality of the jars, many of our customers keep the jars for use after the honey is done rather than taking them to a recycling center.
I use the used glass jars for making homemade salad dressing and as a substitute for Tupperware containers if I need to store small amounts of food in the refrigerator or freezer. I also use a couple for coins, pens and other small desktop items.
Isabel uses the jars for jam like this homemade rhubarb jam with honey or other jams, especially freezer jams. She also uses them to store single servings/small amounts of berries in the freezer. She freezes the berries on a sheet and then puts them in used WEH jars in the freezer; convenient if you want a single serving of berries or if a family is putting berries on yogurt or muesli or using them in a shake or smoothie later. Isabel also uses them for storing bulk-quantity nuts as nuts (like honey) stay fresher in the freezer.