Honey
Eat honey, my child, since it is good; honey that drips from the comb is sweet to the taste”
Proverbs 24
Of course, we would not be a bee-based business without honey.
We sell most of our honey and comb honey wholesale. For now, you can find us at Suttil’s Garden, and Hy-Vee.
Our signature Whole Honey with Comb is honey comb (all natural wax) cut from the frame and jarred with as much of the extracted honey as we can fit.
Every piece is a little different as the bees build out their comb, but every jar is as real as it gets.
We are working on getting our commercial kitchen up and running to offer additional products. It’s a work in progress.
Why does local matter?
All our honey is locally harvested and packaged. What does local mean to us? It means that if we did not harvest the honey ourselves, we have been to the bee yard it is coming from! There are many local beekeepers we can support with fair wholesale prices. This allows us to bring you a truly local product, it lets any hobbyist get a fair price for their honey without having to retail it and it also reduces the carbon footprint since none of the honey came from anywhere but Central Illinois!
Having local honey that is also harvested with minimal heat preserves the integrity of the honey.
We are currently retailing our honey on a limited basis to focus on building up our apiaries.
On sustainability…
We are selling most of our honey in canning jars – it allows you to scrape out honey that has crystallized, gently heat it (we find overnight in the oven with just the light on works great) and, when the honey is gone, you can re-use the jars for anything you want!
Bee-Based Cosmetics and Collabs
We want to eventually be able to carry a full complement of locally produced bee-based products. Our local beekeepers have a wealth of talent from soapmaking to beauty products that we would like to be able to provide a stage for.
In addition, we welcome opportunities for collaborations on products such as the limited- edition Bourbon-barrel aged Bee Mafia Honey we invested in with our good friends at Kaesebier farms.
Non-Alcoholic Beverages
We are working on perfecting recipes for non-alcoholic beverages with the same high quality standards as our mead and beer and, of course, made with local honey.
Lemonades and Syrups
We are working on different drink-syrups made with local honey and other, regional ingredients to offer you a delicious soda-pop alternative.
There are plentiful resources regionally available ranging from Peaches and Apples to Elderberry and Rose Hips to the family of mints and other herbs that can be used for syrups.
We are also looking into making flavoring syrups.
Kombucha
This probiotic, tea-based drink is fermented with a SCOBY and has been around for thousands of years. It has a natural acidity and mild carbonation.
Original Honey Ale
Andy’s simple and easy ale developed as a homebrew is finished with local raw honey and has been a favorite of friends and family. We plan to have other varieties of the Steamship Honey Ale as well. We are hoping to offer honey ale beginning 2023.
Mead
We are in the planning stages for the mead operation.
Andy has been honing his mead making skills to our personal enjoyment for some time. All our meads will be made with 100% locally harvested honey. Sourcing all our honey from either our own bee yards or bee yards of fellow local beekeeper who we know and worked alongside of. The honey has been harvested to best preserve aromatics and pollen by not using heat for instance. They will also be 100% sulfite-free and additive-free.
We believe in letting the honey speak for itself and our entire process uses minimal heat for maximal retention of aromatics. All meads will be labeled with the year and the amount of honey used. The higher the honey content, the sweeter the mead will be.