Joshua Callandret
Huge stacks of 55 gallon barrels of honey wait in the Savannah Bee Company’s warehouse on Johnny Mercer Boulevard. A small sample jar of the honey inside each barrel sits on top. “We pull a jar out of each barrel and then we’ll test it and make sure that it’s good,” said Kristen Crawley, who has worked with the local Savannah honey company as a sales representative since June 2010.
The workers watch and taste the honey in the jars to see if the honey demonstrates the characteristics of the type of honey it is supposed to be. For example, tupelo honey, the flagship variety of honey, is not supposed to crystallize. So if a jar of tupelo honey begins to show granulation, it cannot be sold as tupelo. It may be sold instead as a wildflower variety of honey, which is a blend of various honeys.
Color is also noted, and if a jar of honey is a different shade from what it should be, it is likely that the honey is a mix of different varieties. A mixture of different honeys will change the way a type of honey tastes.
“Our honeycomb is single flower varietal,” Crawley said. Single flower varietal means that a single type of flower creates a specific flavor of honey. “They [the bees] generally go within two miles, so we put them in a concentrated area of that type of tree. For example, the swamp has tupelo trees.” Tupelo honey is harvested for about a week in April.
“We’ve got five barrels left,” Crawley said as she points out a few barrels of tupelo honey. “Last year was really low on production because the rainfall was so heavy in the swamp that the buds fell off the trees so the bees didn’t get to bring all the nectar back.”
According to Crawley, tupelo honey is the “gold standard” variety of the Savannah Bee Company. It is the honey that got the company off the ground in 2001.
Harvesting and bottling honey is a long process. Commercial honeybee hives are filled with wooden frames that have a paper-thin layer of wax or wire that serves as the base for the bees to build their honeycomb. The frames stacked within the hives at three-eighths of an inch apart, the same distance between layers of honeycomb in the natural world.
Frames designated solely for honey harvesting have a wire base instead of a wax base. A wax-based frame is used if the honeycomb is to be cut and sold as squares. The bees build their honeycomb on the base, and the frames are collected by the beekeepers when it is time to harvest the honey.
After honey arrives in barrels from the local apiaries and the sample jars prove that the honey meets the quality expectations of the Savannah Bee Company, the barrels are poured into a large bin that filters the honey.
The honey is then pumped into one of several holding tanks for storage. A whiteboard on the wall denotes which tank contains what honey.
When the honey is ready to be bottled, the honey is pumped through a warmer so it becomes less viscous and easier to pour. Crawley said the company bought an automatic bottler two weeks ago, but bottling honey used to be much more hands on. The previously used machine would require a worker to put each bottle under a dispenser and push a button to fill it with honey.
Crawley points to the older machine near the bottling room doorway, “Literally someone would sit here all day and put the jar, push the button, let it go, put the jar, push the button, move it over. It was a hand done job.” The new bottler uses a conveyor belt to keep the production more efficiently.
The Savannah Bee Company has expanded greatly in the past decade. Today the company sells a wide variety of honey and bee-related products including raw honeycomb, beeswax lip balm and soap.
Although the company has grown, labels are still applied by hand, honeycomb squares are cut by hand, and employees counts out sets of 36 sticks of lip balm to box up for shipping.
To this day the Savannah Bee Company still retains the hands-on approach to business that helped build its reputation in the first place.
