Sweet Persistence in the Cold Season

Hello Emma,

We apologise for the lengthy delay in providing you with any bee or honey related news of late and we hope you are weathering this year's cold and very wet winter months.

We have been busy bees packing honey and fulfilling orders over winter while navigating the ever changing landscape that is the NSW Varroa incursion. Tim will touch on our situation in relation to the debilitating little mites reaching our shores in his beekeeping updates below.

In more positive news, we have two new four packs available in time for Winter and Father's day. We also have a small amount of beeswax in stock for those of you who have been patiently waiting for a number of months.

Since we last wrote, we have been very fortunate to have our Wild Honey featured on another two episodes of Masterchef Australia. Both of our Blue Mountains Wild honeys were used in dishes by the judges and contestants - more information and links to recipes below.

Tim is also making his biennial trip to the city this week and will be speaking at a few events while he is down there. Read on for the full deets!

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New Four Packs and Beeswax

New Mixed Wild Honey 500g Four Pack

Our first Wild Honey Four Pack featuring Red Bloodwood

We are excited to offer you our first, and quite possibly only, mixed four pack of Wild Honey that includes our Limited Edition Gold Label, Red Bloodwood Wild Honey from the Lower Blue Mountains. The Red Bloodwood is proving very popular (for instance, Neil Perry is a fan - read on for details) and we have received a number of requests to include it in a four pack, so...voila!

This edition we are rewarding our loyal subscribers with early access to this new four pack as well as a new 200g four pack that includes two jars of our popular Red Stringybark Wild Honey (both packs are included in our Select Products section below).

Golden Goodness

Beeswax is Back Again (for a short time)!

Tim has been very busy processing the honey we managed to harvest from last summer's wet season. As a result we have a small amount of beeswax back in stock (after it sold out again last month) for all of those patient customers who have been asking for it between now and Christmas! It’s wonderful to have this clean, chemical free beeswax available again. Be sure to get in fast as there is a limited number of each size available.

We also have another new variety almost ready for release - we will keep everyone updated via our newsletter and Instagram as to when it will be available - stay tuned!

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In the Spotlight

This week, Tim will be heading into Sydney for the first time since the Covid pandemic began. In addition to meeting with distributors and chefs, he has been invited to speak about our Wild Honey and Natural Beekeeping methods by our friends and good customers, Laura and Grant of Feather and Bone.

The event will be held this Wednesday evening at their new premises in Waverley and the tickets include honey tasting, a charcuterie plate and drinks! At this stage, the night is sold out but there is a waiting/cancellation list if you are feeling lucky on the event webpage.

We are once again thrilled that our Wild Honey was a featured ingredient on two more MasterChef episodes this year.

Head chef and co-owner of Gelato Messina, Donato Toce, set his incredible gelato dish, Honey, as a pressure test a month or so ago and the contestants used our Blue Mountains Post Brood Wild Honey to create each component.

In addition, the two renowned chefs and MasterChef judges, Andy Allen and Jock Zonfrillo, chose our Blue Mountains Polyflora as a featured ingredient in their 'Judges vs. Contestants' cook off leading up to the grand final.

Needless to say, the creative use of our Wild Honey by the MasterChef crew, and internationally renowned chefs, on national TV is so heartening to see, given the blood, sweat and tears Tim and the bees pour into producing it. A huge thank you to the MasterChef team, Clare Smyth and Donato Toce for recognising how unique our Wild Honey is.

If you missed any of the episodes featuring our Blue Mountains varieties, we have excerpts loaded on our Media page, and links to the full episode and recipes featuring our Wild Honeys.

Neil Perry's name is synonymous with fine food in Australia. To have the multi award-winning chef, and owner of many of Australia’s leading restaurants (including the prestigious Rockpool venues and Margaret Restaurant), post about your produce on Instagram, not once, but twice, in the same year is quite an honour.

Neil wrote that our two 'Red' Wild Honey varieties were a delicious pairing with Coppertree Farms butter on toast in his posts (see below). We are most grateful to Neil for sharing that our Wild Honey is one of his toast toppings of choice!

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For more information on Tim Malfroy and Malfroy's Gold in the public eye, visit our Social, Awards, Blogs and Media pages (the latter also includes recipes from some of Australia's finest chefs who champion our produce!)

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Stock Up for Winter

Product News

In addition to the new 500g four pack featuring Red Bloodwood, we have also created another 200g four pack for winter that includes two jars of Red Stringybark for those who love our darker, rich honey.

As mentioned above, we have the two sizes of Beeswax Blocks in stock again (for a limited time) and we have on offer our usual bounty of Wild Honey (which is available in 3 jar sizes for most varieties) and a small number of Wild Honeycomb frames.

Our existing Mixed Wild Honey Four Packs are still available for those who prefer to buy in larger quantities at a reduced price.

As always we have E-Gift vouchers available for sweet and simple gifts for Father's Day!

Shipping and Housekeeping

As has been the case for the past year or so, the $60 minimum order and $15 flat shipping rate is in place and should be fixed at those rates for the foreseeable future.

It can take us up to a week to process orders as everything is done in house, from the production of the goods all the way through to the packaging and posting of your order. We generally allow another week for goods to be delivered as we live in Regional Australia.

Therefore, please ensure any orders that need to be delivered to you in time for Father's Day are placed before the 20th of August.

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This Month's Select Products

* Please note we are bound by Australian Biosecurity regulations so are not permitted to send honey to TAS, NT or WA

Social Insects

Tim's Warré beekeeping adventures in the Blue Mountains and Central Tablelands

Winter has truly set in out in the Central Tablelands with very few days above 10°C. The unrelenting rain has continued, setting a bleak backdrop to a time of uncertainty and change. Nevertheless, there are always things to be grateful for!

In terms of our work, winter is a time for pressing and bottling wild honey, melting beeswax and planning for the season ahead. In the last month I’ve bottled some very nice batches of Blue Mountains Polyflora, Yellow Box and Mountain Meadow which meant I could also melt some clean, chemical free beeswax into blocks.

As I write, I’m just about to leave for a quick trip to Sydney where I’m honoured to be talking at Feather and Bone’s new retail store. I’ll also be visiting Two Providores, our wonderful distributor, to catch up with their sales team and then hit the road to visit some of the chefs who support us.

On the ute will be a significant batch of ‘honeywax’ to be delivered to our mates at Wildflower Brewing. After pressing the honey from the natural comb, the remaining dark wax - fragrant and sticky with honey, propolis and bee bread - is put into pails and reserved for Wildflower.

These comb fragments are fermented with their house culture beer to make an extraordinary beverage, Hive - Post Brood. The result is entirely unique and delicious and we’re excited to be supplying three variations of the honey wax, which will see the light of day in a number of months as three different post brood beers.

After years of a revolving door of natural disasters, the recent news of the Varroa mite (the most serious pest affecting honeybees worldwide) arriving to our shores has been something of a sucker punch. I’m hesitant to write too much about the incursion as the situation is changing daily, as is the government's response, making anything I write redundant. Thankfully, we do not have any apiaries (at this stage) in the eradication zone. If/once Varroa becomes established we will continue promoting natural, chemical free methods for living with the mite.

One positive aspect of being the last country in the world to get Varroa (apart from the bliss of living without it for so many years) is that natural approaches to Varroa management have gained traction in many parts of the world, and in some countries and regions ‘treatment free’ beekeepers are even in the majority. In addition to the promising experiences of practical beekeepers, Apiologists have also proposed a chemical free approach to the Varroa problem, with some of the greatest minds in modern apicultural science voicing their support for such.

My original attraction to the Warré hive and Natural Beekeeping philosophy was not to produce honey but to solve real world problems (such as Varroa) that were happening in apiaries at the time, while also acknowledging the need to build a resilient model for a future with additional pressures on bees and beekeepers due to climate change, pests and diseases. The Wild Honey we produce is merely an outcome of those natural methods.

That same method and philosophy is why we have been very fortunate to attract aspiring natural beekeepers from overseas to work with us in Australia, as they want to gain experience and adopt similar bee-centric practices in their home countries. We keep in contact with these beekeepers, who we count as close friends, to share insights and experiences about bees in general, including specific issues and techniques for dealing with Varroa naturally.

In that sense, we have a unique insight into how our natural approach may work if/when Varroa becomes established. We’re also grateful to have regular discussions with some of the pioneering natural beekeepers and apiologists around the world who are voicing their support for natural approaches to managing Varroa and look forward to sharing their research and findings soon.

If you enjoy reading these newsletters you can view archived copies of them here, as well as articles that I’ve written which I hope to add to over the years.

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Tim will continue to fill your feed with updates from the field about the ever changing and unique flora of the regions, bee biology, our wild honey produce and other interesting things - all bee related - follow along below!

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Part of Our Hive

Jacqui Challinor is a long standing supporter of our produce and natural beekeeping methods. She has been working with our Wild Honey and Honeycomb in her restaurant, Nomad, in both sweet and savoury dishes for some years now.

One of the more celebrated of her desserts that features our Wild Honeycomb is her amazing olive oil icecream sandwich, which she serves in her Sydney and Melbourne Nomad venues. If you are lucky enough to live nearby you should definitely try it!

If you have some first hand experience in kitchens at all, Jacqui has provided the recipe for the dish and you can watch a video of her preparing it here. Jacqui also presented this same dish on Adam Liaw's SBS food program The Cook Up a while back.

This dish is so good we had a customer request our honeycomb be sent to them in China so they could make it themselves after eating at Nomad while visiting Sydney!

Jacqui has also created a Pecan, honey, olive oil and Manjimup black truffle cookie ice cream sandwich that features our Wild Honey that looks equally delicious!

View more inspiring creations by some of Australia's (and the world's) top chefs using our bee produce on our Awards and Recognition page.

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A warm welcome to our new subscribers who discovered us through MasterChef and a big thank you to our readers for taking the time to follow what we do and for their kind words of support, particularly recently with the threat of Varroa on our doorstep.

A special thanks to those of you who repeatedly purchase our Wild Honey, Honeycomb and Beeswax (either through our online shop, distributors or directly). We are so grateful for our supporters and customers, particularly those who have been ordering from us for many years now.

We hope you enjoyed our sixth newsletter and are always happy to hear your thoughts. (If you missed our last newsletter and would like to read it you can do so here.)

Thank you for reading,
Tim, Emma and the Daughters of Light