Orange Blossom Honey

The Site

Orange Blossom Honey is a site that is all about-you guessed it!-orange blossom honey, a favorite type of honey among beekeepers, cooks, and your normal, everyday honey lovers.

The site is still in its baby stages, but we hope to make it an educational (and fun) place to learn about orange blossom honey: how to cook with it, what makes its flavor so special, and more!

The Honey

At Blue Ridge Honey Company, we produce and sell raw honey.
Raw honey has not been pasteurized or finely filtered.

Huh?
Pasteurizing exposes honey to high temperatures in order to kill the yeasts found in raw honey. This can keep honey from fermenting. However, those high temperatures also kill off the honey’s enzymes, many of which have been added by the bees themselves!

A finely filtered honey may look prettier than raw honey (it is clear, bright and looks great on a shelf in the supermarket). However, when you finely filter honey, you remove the healthy stuff, such as particles of pollen, beeswax and propolis.

For these reasons, we choose to keep our honey a “raw honey.”

The People

Bob Binnie
aka: The Honey Man or Beekeeper Bob
Blue Ridge Honey Company started out as a hobby where Bob was able to revisit the art of beekeeping that he had learned while living in Oregon. Bob’s hobby quickly turned into a side business, then a full-fledged family business. While we’ve all played our part in the business, the company owes its existence to Bob. He is in charge of the bees, the honey production, the equipment, and the myriad of problems and decisions that come up in small businesses. He also gets stung. A lot.

Bob is passionate about educating fellow beekeepers about their craft, as well as educating the public about the benefits of raw honey. Ask anyone who has spent time at the Binnie household: the phone constantly rings with people calling to ask for Bob’s advice or opinion. He has held numerous titles in the beekeeping community, including the 2008 and 2009 President of the Georgia Beekeepers Association, and is a regular guest speaker at beekeeping events throughout the South.

Bob’s favorite honey is Purple Starthistle Honey because it’s “unique.” When pressed for a better explanation, he replied, “It tastes like candy.” To be honest, his favorite type of honey seems to fluctuate, but he tends to prefer the lighter-colored honeys.

Suzette Binnie
aka, Queen Bee
Suzette manages the “office” side of things. She also takes care of the shipping department, which means that if you place an order on the Blue Ridge Honey Company website, she will be the one taking care of your order. She does not go poking around in the bee hives.

Suzette’s favorite honey is Tulip Poplar Honey, a dark honey with a strong taste. She also likes her coffee black and her wines red and full-bodied. It looks like there’s a correlation there between her honey preference and her coffee/wine preference!

Cheryl Binnie
aka, . . . um . . . well, she doesn’t have a clever, honey-related nickname.
Cheryl is Bob and Suzette’s daughter, and she takes care of the orangeblossomhoney.org website. She is learning about the behind-the-scenes workings of the internet and has somehow gotten roped into helping her parents with the online portion of their business.

Cheryl likes her coffees with cream and sugar, and her wines bright and sweet, but well-balanced and smooth. Her favorite honey is Sourwood Honey, one of the mild honeys with a light color. When Sourwood Honey is scarce, she goes straight to the Orange Blossom Honey!