Victoria Cosford
Creamed honey – ah the memories! As a child, smearing it on to toast, I always felt there was something both homely and glamorous about it – and then I forgot all about it. Until I saw jars of it at the Sunny Times Honey stall. Relative newcomers to the markets, Aidan and Mischa are the couple behind the operation. Based outside Tyalgum in the caldera of the Tweed Valley, they have about 240 hives in ‘yards arranged all around the valley’, Aidan tells me. ‘The biodiversity is phenomenal!’
The couple only took up beekeeping – and honey-purveying – about six years ago. They’d been growing ginger – indeed still do – and had cover crops like sunflowers in between. When a friend of theirs put hives on their property then decided to move to Tasmania, they were left with the hives. ‘So we’re relatively new beekeepers, and I’m still so excited. I don’t think I’ll ever lose that!’
Aidan is excited – it’s infectious. ‘The hives thrive,’ he says (poetically), ‘wherever we put them.
And the bees will go wherever there are flowers, it’s the ultimate trespass.’
Their stall and their branding are both eye-catching, the bright orange labels of the jarred honey conveying the name in sun-yellow, lowercase simplicity. Mischa is the creative, the one who does all the marketing, while Aidan, in his words, works ‘the hard yards.’ There is only one variety, as well, but ‘it’s a salad of flavours,’ Aidan says. ‘There are a lot of varieties up here and they’re tricky to separate so we just put them all together. It’s different every time we make it and that’s the exciting thing about it. It’s nice to be surprised!’
Back to that creamed honey. I ask Aidan how it’s actually made and he tells me it’s the result of ‘proper raw honey’ which crystallises, then is spun in an extractor to remove the wax. It’s a slow churn – spin, stop, and wait, he explains, which continues over three days.‘
It’s a completely natural process’, he says. ‘It’s a nostalgic thing!’
Sunny Times Honey is at Mullumbimby Farmers Market every Friday from 7am to 11am.
