Why Does Honey Crystallize?

We opened the week tackling one of our most common questions at the market table. If you’ve ever opened a jar of honey to find it’s turned thick, cloudy, and grainy instead of smooth and golden, there’s no need to toss it. Raw honey is a supersaturated solution of natural sugars, mostly glucose and fructose, and glucose doesn’t love staying dissolved forever. Over time it separates out into tiny crystals, especially in cooler temperatures, and that process actually happens faster in raw, unfiltered honey like ours because we haven’t stripped out the natural pollen and enzymes that speed it along. If you like your honey pourable, set the jar in a bowl of warm water and give it a stir now and then until it turns back to liquid gold. Skip the microwave, since high heat can damage the enzymes that make raw honey so good for you.

Do Bees Sleep?

Bees do rest, though it looks nothing like a human dozing on the couch. Researcher Walter Kaiser first documented it in the 1980s, watching forager bees settle down with their legs tucked in, antennae gone still, and bodies drooping until they were completely motionless, sometimes even tipping over on their side. Muscle tone drops, body temperature dips slightly, and it takes more of a nudge than usual to rouse them. Unlike us, bees don’t sleep in one long stretch. They nap in short bursts scattered across day and night, and older foraging bees tend to sleep more deeply and on a more regular pattern than the younger nurse bees, who stay on call for round the clock hive duties. Researchers think rest even plays a role in memory, possibly helping bees hold onto the flight paths and flower patterns behind their foraging.

Fragrance or Essential Oil? Here’s the Difference

Do we use fragrance, and how much? Items like our Fragrance-Free Lotion, Fragrance-Free Soap, and Natural Lip Balm are bare bones, no scents, flavors or essential oils added. Our Bug Balm, Oatmeal Soap, Lavender Lotion and others get their scent from real essential oils such as lavender, peppermint, eucalyptus, and cassia, pulled straight from the plant. Others, like our Honeysuckle Lotion and Balsam Cedar Soap, use a fragrance oil crafted to capture a specific scent, sometimes one that doesn’t otherwise exist in nature. Fragrance oils don’t carry the same aromatherapy properties as essential oils, but they let us offer scents essential oils alone couldn’t recreate. Every fragrance we use, stays within IFRA safety guidelines. Our Balsam Cedar Soap, for instance, sits at a conservative 0.78% usage rate.

A Small Batch of Raw Honey Is Live Online

Here’s the update our far-away friends have been waiting for. A limited batch of our raw honey, rendered straight from the frames of our own Duluth hives, is now available at mielduluth.com/product-category/honey

Local customers can still catch us at the Duluth Farmer’s Market every Wednesday and Saturday, and everyone else can get it shipped free on orders over $65!

Does Honey Need to Be Raw?

Not every jar on a store shelf needs to say “raw” to be honest, but there’s a real difference in what you’re getting. Raw honey is never heated above a certain temperature and never filtered beyond removing wax and debris, so it holds onto natural pollen, enzymes, and trace minerals that full pasteurization and ultra-filtering tend to strip away. That’s part of why our honey can look a little different jar to jar, sometimes a light amber, sometimes a deep red, always full of character from the flowers our bees visited that season.

This week reminded us that even our tiniest workers need their rest, and that the small choices behind our scents matter just as much as the ingredients themselves. Thank you for reading, for asking great questions at our booth, and for supporting local, sustainable beekeeping here in Duluth. We’ll see you at the market!

Stay sweet,
Miel Duluth