Apiaries and the honey collection

Honey took me back to the countryside. I am a member and consultant of the Cooperativa de Apicultores de Panamá, and I keep four apiaries: Santa Fe de Veraguas, Los Asientos in Pedasí, Finca Rosina in Cerro Azul, and Penonomé. Some fifty hives in total, between the production of specialty honeys and pollination.

Four different places means four different bloom cycles, and that is exactly the part that interests me. I harvest and gather honeys from each one, and each arrives with its own information: the forest and the soil of that site, the season, and the hands of whoever works the land there. A honey from Pedasí does not resemble one from Cerro Azul, and that difference is not noise. It is the record of a place and of a particular year.

Out of that came apibotanical identification: follow the bloom, harvest according to the tree, and evaluate the honey with the same rigour as any other drink.

I am now designing sensory surveys to build a descriptive language of Panamanian honeys, which does not yet exist.