Thank You and Well Done to the Esperance Honey Team

Sitting back at the bush van after a long day on the hives.

Three cheers for this year is almost done! At the moment, the bees are up in the Great Western Woodlands harvesting Merrit (Eucalyptus flocktoniae), one of our favourite honeys! With light aromatics and caramel undertones you may remember it from last year. We are currently enjoying time out in the bush, tending to the hives and already feeling the Summer heat.

We had some major challenges facing us this year, between last summer’s bushfires and COVID-19. This year one of our favoured winter locations, Cascades, joined other local farming areas being declared water deficient. It was looking to be a particularly tough year for all.

Tyler filling IBCs to cart water to the apiary sites.

We want to thank all the farmers who we came into contact with this year.. we had our largest number of hives ever needing winter floral sources to continue their health and breeding throughout the season. It was quite a challenge for the Esperance Honey boys to coordinate the migrations, but with the generous spirit of farmers opening their gates to us, we were able to pull it off. With decent yields and pollination on our canola, vetch and tagasaste sites and truck loads of healthy bees ready to migrate north.

Esperance Honey received a RED Grant to upgrade our facility and become B-QUAL certified.

2020 brought with it some very bright moments. We launched our first-ever Instagram page, website and online retail store, which brought us closer to you than before. We increased our hive numbers and with it, our ability to produce more honey to bring to you. We took part in a very successful Rottnest Island queen bee breeding program, an industry program aimed at continuous improvement of our bee breeding stock. And we began the process of becoming certified with B-QUAL, an internationally recognised apiary and honey certification process that will allow us to receive greater recognition for the excellence of our products.

This year, we were successful in our application to the Goldfields Esperance Development Commission (GEDC) for a grant as part of the state government’s regional economic development scheme. RED Grants are awarded to local businesses hoping to start up or expand a business which will make a positive contribution to the community.

Our grant is allocated to us improving and expanding the Esperance Honey operations. We’re currently in the process of renovating our processing site in Esperance and will be upgrading our equipment. We will be able to expand our product range by producing creamed honey (perfect on a cheese board or on toast), more bee pollen, honeycomb and candles.

All of our honey that you’ll find on our online shop or in Esperance outlets is currently packaged by hand. The new equipment will have part of the packaging process automated, meaning that we can get even more of our beautiful, single site and mono-varietal honeys out to you, whilst having more time to focus on what we feel is the most important part of our job – finding the best sites for our hives and taking care of our bees.

Kev keeping this hive healthy with a new queen.

We’ve been very lucky to have been given the opportunity to do all this – and we would like to thank the GEDC and the Minister for Regional Development the Hon. Alannah MacTiernan, for understanding and supporting our vision. We would also like to thank and congratulate our staff, who work immensely hard and enthusiastically to find and deliver the best honey, making Esperance Honey what it is today. We want to applaud the other applicants and recipients for their vision and work to develop their industries. The Esperance Tjaltjraak Native Title Aboriginal Corporation project is an important step for the regeneration of the natural environment called the New Skills, Ancient Practices project. Esperance Distillery Co. is enhancing interest in what our little patch of the world has to offer through a gin made with local botanicals through their Still Upgrade project. We are grateful to the agencies and organisations who helped us out through consultation when we communicated our future goals for Esperance Honey. It’s been very inspiring to be among such a helpful and encouraging business community.

And of course, we also want to thank all of our customers and supporters for your feedback. We love hearing from people who’ve read our new Journal, and followed us on social media – thanks for getting behind us!!

We think 2021 is going to be a big but very exciting year. Our focus continues to be on bringing you what we believe is some of the world’s best honey from the most beautiful and unique places on earth.