It’s kind of quiet at EssexGirl Honey.

The winter weather in this part of New Jersey has been highly variable over the past couple of years. This doesn’t seem to agree with the bees, and we’ve had to resupply in various ways–capturing swarms, making splits, and reordering bees. (They come in “packages” through the mail!)

We had a number of problems with our bee supplier in 2024–who promised bees multiple times and never delivered. This meant we weren’t able to produce any honey for 2024.

We’ve switched suppliers, and we have new bees on the way, so if the weather cooperates, then there’s hope for 2025.

The bees don’t know anything about COVID-19 and are doing their thing–no social distancing in the hive while they bring in the nectar and make honey.

We have honey available and will harvest 2020 spring honey in a few weeks!

If you’ve been trying to email us with no answer, please call 973.744.0701–our web hosting site has been having intermittent email problems!

Hi Everyone,

We’ve recently extracted and bottled some rich, dark, fall honey. The big difference between Fall and Spring honey comes from the flowers that it was extracted from. In New Jersey the darker fall honey comes from Japanese Knotweed, a plant that blooms much later than other plants, and gives honey a distinct color and flavor. Since it’s one of the only sources of nectar in the fall, all our fall honey is much darker, but still just as good!

Japanese Knotweed gives the honey a deep, buckwheat taste. It’s very different than light honey, but it’s definitely worth a try. If you’re interested in buying some, you can contact me at oliver@essexgirlhoney.com or 973-744-0701.

Thanks,

Oliver

Hey everyone!

Unfortunately, we are all out of honey. It’s been a great season, and the bees are working hard to produce more. In fact, all seven hives survived the winter. Bees commonly die in the winter for a multitude of reasons. When winter begins all the bees cluster up at the bottom of the hive, and slowly work their way to the top eating their stored honey as they go. If the hive is weak going into the winter, the bees will not have enough honey and starve to death. Even if the bees do have enough honey, they can still move up the hive too quickly, or break their cluster too early. We have never had this many hives after winter, and we are optimistic that we will have lots of honey, early in the year. Hopefully around Father’s Day.