Beekeeping For Dummies
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Unless you put your beehives on a farm with acres of specific flowering plants, your bees will collect myriad nectars from many different flowers, which results in a delicious honey that's a blend of the many flowers in your area. This type of honey is classified as wildflower honey. Wildflower honey is what most backyard beekeepers produce.

Note also that eating such honey is an effective way to fend off local pollen allergies — a natural way of inoculating yourself.

Some beekeepers harvest honey from a single floral source, resulting in varietals or uni-floral honeys. Granted, several acres of that single floral source are needed, and the bees must be prepared to work the bloom at the very moment it is producing nectar. But what you get from this focused approach are honeys that have distinctive flavor profiles that resemble the flower and region from which the honey is harvested.

Simply put, varietal honeys are poetry in nature.

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 Courtesy of Marina Marchese

Some of the honey varietals from around the world that are in honey connoisseur Marina Marchese's collection.

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