Often when you the term "busy bee," it conjures up a person buzzing around, getting things done, not so much a winged creature flyign from flower to flower.  But when it come to raw honey, the term takes on a whole new meaning.  In fact, it takes both busy humans and busy bees to get this sweet and sticky product from flower, to hive, to jar.  This week we are lucky to have raw honey from not one, but TWO local beekeepers. 

First, there's the very local honey that many of you have come to know and love from from Pam's beekeeping husband, Steve.  Labeled and sold as Vortex House Honey (named after their family residence in W. Philly), the supply is limited and disappears quickly .  Customers swear that this honey is the best and that it helps with their seasonal allergies because it's made by bees that gather nectar from a wide variety of local flowers

It certainly is delicious. And it certainly is local. Steve's hives are located on rooftops in West Philadelphia and in a Quaker burial ground near Cobbs Creek Park in Upper Darby. The bees forage on a mixture of flowers including Tulip Poplar, Raspberry, and Linden. The honey is carefully extracted in small batches and never filtered or heated, therefore retaining all the healthful properties of this wonderful natural sweetener!

We've also got raw honey new kid on the block, Urban Apiaries, whose line of rooftop raw honeys has gotten local media buzzing (see this article in the Philadelphia Inquirer).  Urban Apiaries is a joint venture between Annie Baum-Stein, owner of the local foods market Milk & Honey in West Philly and beekeeper Trey Flemming of Two Gander Farm.  Ingeniously, this line denotes the origin of each jar of honey via a zip code sticker on the top of every bottle, letting the honey eater know just what section of Philadelphia's flora helped the bees make the honey.  We have zip codes 19143 and 19148 in stock.