Honey for Christmas

A friend posted about his selling raw honey from his province of Surigao del Norte. These were not farmed but collected from wild beehives in the mountains. I have been aware of the benefits of raw honey as compared with the commercial honey usually found in supermarkets (some raw honey are actually only packaged as such but are actually commercial honey usually with glucose or other ingredients mixed in). Commercial honey is also pasteurized or heated. You can research about this and there are many resources online if you want to know much about raw honey.

I ordered a couple of containers of honey for us to give away to family and friends this Christmas. We always think about what to give away for Christmas and this idea came about as I was browsing my Facebook account and saw an old friend's post about honey. It was an idea that translated into an assembly line for the our gifts that included sterilizing bottles, transferring the honey and printing and affixing stickers on each bottle that contained our holiday message.

We transferred the honey from the container it was shipped on to these jars we got from Ikea. Each jar contained standard 1 cup of raw honey.

Here is a close up of the jars of honey. We had to do a final 'quality check' to make sure that each jar contained about the same amount of raw honey. You can see from the photo some differences in the content of each jar.

Here's an even closer look at a jar of honey.

Another look at a jar of honey this time in daylight.

The color of the raw honey is a golden yellow. My friend says this was collected from tall trees and was lighter colored than the raw honey collected from lower hives. I have yet to research on this color aspect of the raw honey but I guess it also has something to do with the source of the nectar from which the honey was made by the bees. Of course, the taste is also influenced by the source but I am not a connoisseur for raw honey. :)

We still have a container of honey at home that we have not transferred to bottles. One uncle already asked if we had some more to spare as he used honey as a sweetener for his coffee and tea. It's also good for pancakes instead of the usual syrup. I'll try to write about other uses later when I get to try the honey for those.
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