According to U.S. Department of Agriculture figures, honey production in Maine jumped by 25 percent last year, and more people are keeping bees than ever before.
But as part of a local foods boom, there’s still room for growth in Maine’s tiniest livestock.
In Springvale, honey bees are getting ready to fly out for a day’s exploration. Over the next few months the bees will embark on a sun-up to sun-down race to visit every tasty flower, gathering pollen and nectar as the hive makes as much of the liquid gold as it can before the next winter hits.
“The basic guideline is, in Maine, 25 pounds of honey per colony,” says Master Beekeeper Richard McLaughlin. “In better forage areas I’ve had beekeepers tell me that they’ve made 50 or a 100 pounds a hive.”
Like most beekeepers he knows, McLaughlin says he can get rid of the honey as quickly as the bees pump it out. And that can be a lot.
Unlike bumblebees, which also make honey, honeybees don’t stop making the honey even when the colony has a full supply. Rather, they keep making it and finding places to store the excess. It’s this excess supply that beekeepers tap, says McLaughlin.
A quick honey lesson: bees leave the hive in search of sweet, sugary nectar from wildflowers. The insects actually drink the nectar and then repeatedly regurgitate it until it’s a concentrated, sticky substance.
To put it bluntly, honey can be thought of as, well, bee vomit. And what it tastes like varies a lot.
“Just like every flower has a different fragrance, its nectar has a different taste,” says Phil Gaven of the Honey Exchange in Portland.
Gaven says if you’ve only tasted the kind that comes in a bear-shaped squeeze bottle, then you’re missing out on a whole world of flavors. Raw, unfiltered honey, he says, may be liquid and sugary or it may be heavy, scoopable, peppery and barely sweet.
A former chef, Gaven says he’s found himself a niche by starting a boutique exclusively dedicated to honey and its connoisseurs.
“So on the tasting bar, you can see a range of colors from the light basswood honey from Vermont to a darker mangrove honey from the swamps of Florida,” he says.
When asked whether there’s a method of characterizing honey flavors — like the flavor wheel for wine — Gaven crosses the room and holds up a brightly colored wheel.
“It’s right here,” he says. “Actually produced at the same place — UC Davis.”
The wheel shows flavor profiles ranging from caramel and tropical fruit, to pepper, saffron and spices and even flavors of sweat, locker room and cat pee. Yes, it actually says “cat pee” on the wheel.
Gaven says opening a specialty shop is always a gamble, but with the current popularity of local, artisanal, farm produce, it’s one that has paid off.
“So we’ve been open for five years. And the first four there was this steady increase. This year, it went insane. New beekeepers by the scores,” he says.
Beekeeping can be lucrative, Gaven says. Barring a natural disaster, after about $200 in start-up costs the first year, he says a good beekeeper can make about $1,000 from a single hive.
The number of licensed beekeepers in Maine has tripled over the last ten years, standing at 975 in 2015, a number that’s expected to go up. Additionally, the number of hives in Maine doubled over the same period to 10,000.
Maine produced about 470,000 pounds of honey in 2015, up 25 percent from the year before.
But all this honey effort is still just a drop in the bucket; currently, there’s nothing on Gaven’s tasting bar from Maine because there’s never any stock left over at the end of the season.
“We have huge demand for local honey and the supply has been lagging behind that for many, many years,” he says. “I know everything I can get my hands on I can put it in a jar and sell it at full retail.”
It’s basically a sellers’ market at this point, says Gaven, with a lot more room for production.
Late this summer, there will be a run on the dark, caramel-flavor knotweed honey that comes from an area between Saco and Gorham. Customers, he says, will also be looking for honeys from Bath and Woolwich, which have a distinct butter flavor. And there’s the good old-fashioned goldenrod honey that’s produced statewide.
Most of it will retail for $15-$18 per pound — quite a lot more than that bear-shaped squeeze bottle. But even at those prices, he says, it will fly from the shelves.
