Introducing: Backyard Honey

We've recently teamed up with the legends at Backyard Honey to stock their local honey blends at all Cannings stores. These apiarists have a really interesting and unique story - and we want to share it with you!

What is Backyard Honey?

Ever wanted your own beehive in your backyard, but not sure you have the skills to tend to all those bees on your own? That's where Backyard Honey comes in! Backyard Honey places and tends to hives all over Melbourne, in people's very own backyards. These bees then pollinate the plants in your garden (and beyond), travelling 2 - 5km from the hive to collect nectar. Backyard Honey visits and cares for the bees, and at the end of the season the backyard-host gets 10kg of delicious local honey from their own garden and we (the lucky people of Melbourne) get to enjoy the rest as official Backyard Honey!

Backyard Honey produce a number of hyper-local blends from these hives with over 20+ ’suburbs’ of honey (with this number growing each season!) - and they just happen to have a blend for every Cannings store! We are stocking local honey at the respective stores for all Cannings locations: Kew honey for Kew, Malvern honey for Malvern, and so on for Hawthorn, Ivanhoe, South Yarra, Tooronga (Glen Iris)and Richmond.

Backyard honey is 100% Australian, pure, cold extracted raw honey from hand-tended hives in local backyard gardens surrounding our stores. Each hive and season produces a unique, small batch honey, filled with the multifloral flavours of your local neighbourhood.

Why is this so cool?

Local honey is thought to strengthen your immune system and fight seasonal pollen allergies. This is because when you choose locally sourced honey, the bees are collecting nectar from plants in your area, which in turn can strengthen your immune system against that pollen. It doesn't get much more local than Backyard Honey - depending on where you live, these bees could even have collected nectar from your own garden - how cool is that!

More cool honey facts:

• Bees must visit over 1 million flowers to produce 1 jar of honey
• Bees are 100% responsible for pollinating lucerne, one of the favourite plants of grass-fed cattle. No bees, no beef!
• Backyard Honey is a natural prebiotic and digestive aid
• A spoonful of raw honey an hour before bed may help insomniacs sleep better
• The natural antiseptic qualities of Backyard Honey will help relieve a sore throat and provide natural topical aid for cuts and burns

Why is it important to buy local Australian honey?

Unfortunately, honey is one of the most adulterated products worldwide. What does this mean? It means that imported honey is often "cut" with sugar syrup, meaning that many products that are marketed as "honey" aren't really. Honey can be an amazing addition to a healthy diet, with a whole host of natural health benefits. Sugar syrup? Not so much.

This is a big problem across the globe - an EU-wide testing campaign in 2021/22 randomly sampled a total of 320 honey consignments from 20 different countries, and over 46% of samples were suspected to contain adulterated (fraudulent) honey. A similar study took place in Australia around 2018 that showed that almost "one in five Australian honey samples are fake", and "more than half of the samples sourced from Asia were adulterated" (ABC News). This is why it's so important to know your apiarists - and the reason that real, raw, local honey comes at a higher price point than (often imported) brands you can find in the supermarket.

On top of this lack of transparency, big brand honey producers often mix lots of different batches of honey from different places together, which means you're not getting the extra benefits that local honey can provide.

Finally, the biggest reason to support local apiarists is that bees are so important to our entire eco system, and as we've heard in recent years, bee populations are becoming more and more at risk. No bees, no plants, no food! Did you know that almonds are exclusively pollinated by bees, so most almond growers have to get beehives transported over to their farms to pollinate their almonds yearly? There are countless examples like this of the crucial impact of bees on our natural world. Local apiarists play such an important role in our food system, let's support the people who take care of this precious natural resource.

Whether you're buying Backyard Honey or you're shopping from another apiarist - make sure you're buying pure, real Aussie honey. For the bees!