A light, approachable honey with a smooth finish.

The Last Forage

Autumn Forest Creamed Honey

There comes a point in autumn when you look across the bush and think there can't possibly be much left.

The great flowering seems to be over. Winter is closing in. The tracks are about to turn to mud, and to human eyes, the Jarrah State Forest looks as though it's beginning to settle down for the season.

The bees knew better.

Scattered through that enormous stretch of bush were the last autumn flowers. Banksias of all kinds. A little Parrot Bush. Marri blossom. And countless tiny flowers tucked away in places we never saw and probably couldn't name even if we did.

To us, there didn't seem to be much flowering at all.

To the bees, there was a feast.

And that might be one of the greatest little miracles of keeping bees.

A honeybee can venture kilometres from her hive searching for nectar, navigating an enormous landscape in a way we can barely comprehend. But for a colony to put away honey in real abundance, somewhere out there the bush has to be giving.

These bees found it.

Day after day they disappeared into the forest, seeing something we couldn't see, returning heavy with nectar from flowers hidden amongst thousands of hectares of wild country.

And somehow, against our expectations, they made an extraordinary amount of honey.

It became their final great forage before winter.

We harvested just before the rains arrived and the forest tracks became too wet and muddy to work safely. We left stores for the bees, and then they came home with us to Bedfordale, where we could keep a closer eye on them through the cold months ahead.

But their last taste of the wild forest came too.

We've taken that autumn honey and slowly creamed it, transforming its natural crystals into a beautifully smooth, velvety texture while keeping it raw.

The flavour carries the complexity you'd expect from a place where no single flower tells the whole story. Banksia, Marri, Parrot Bush, autumn blossom and all those nameless little flowers the bees found that we never did.

That's what makes this honey special.

It isn't simply a taste of what was flowering.

It's a taste of what we couldn't see.

A final hidden abundance, discovered by thousands of tiny foragers just before winter closed the forest behind them.

Sometimes we take the bees to the bush.

Sometimes they show us just how little of it we really see.

The Last Forage. Found by bees. Hidden from us.