NORWAY | No1, Summer | No2, Honeydew | No3, Bell Heather | No4, Mountain Heather | No5, Raspberry | No6, Mountain | No7, Multiflora | No8, Forest Berry | No9, Coastal Heather | No10, Heather |

No4, Mountain Heather Honey

The honey

This honey is from around 1100 meters above sea level , in the east side of Norway in mountains. I drive the bees up there around late July and take them home again around 3 weeks later, middle of august .

This honey is from the short heater blossom that grows in the Wild in the mountains , like this year you could smell the Heather honey smell from the flowers in the mountains when you go for a walk, this flower gives a lot of nectar in a very short period of time , this period is maybe 2 - 3 weeks and then the winter Can come very fast , from 25 degrees celcius to freezing point in a few days .

When i harvest honey , i always check water content before extraction , I try to make the bees dry the honey Down , but they dont always make that when i have to harvest before the winter comes . Then i dry the honey down to about 18% and less in water content .

The Beekeeping

I am working with breeding of the Black bees, Apis mellifera mellifera. My beekeeping is with these amazing bees are in the wild forest and wild mountain areas. 

After i harvest the honey from summer in the forest, I give the bees around 10 kg honey per hive before I take them for a long ride up the mountains for the heather honey, I have many apiaries up there from 500 meters above sea to 1100 meters above sea level, this is to make sure they have nectar at different stages and i better time to do the work.

When flowering is almost done at 500 meters above sea level I take the bees even further up the mountains to harvest heather honey at around 1100 meters above sea level. The season is really short up there, it can go from 25 degrees at day and heather is blooming to suddenly changing to snow.

These blackbees are amazing honey collectors and work under really hard conditions. The mountains are also the home to wild reindeer, moose, bears and wolves.

Norsk vikinghonning AS: Vikinghonning.com