Si-Mel SavidakisHoney Production
Our production comes from selected thyme fields in Sitia Crete, with exceptional aroma and flavor, a special gift of Cretan nature. It is inspected and analysed with very strict and high quality standards.
Our Honey Production..
Sitia’s geological properties and climatic conditions (warm-dry climate), where the main blossom is thyme, aid to the production of a high quality thyme honey with an intense aroma and exquisite flavour, rich in thyme ethereal oil. Wild thyme honey is the most emblematic honey of Crete. Wild thyme, with its distinct blue-purple flowers, grows in abundance on the rocky, barren wind- and sea-beaten shores of Crete. It is the only plant on the island that fully blossoms in June and July, and from which the bees can collect nectar and pollen.
The result is a dense honey with a gold colour and an intense, complex flavor of wild thyme. This unique honey, with its fragrant smell, nutritional value and scientifically proven high anti-infectious and healing properties, has always been highly prized by locals and visitors alike.
Honey Harvest
Thyme honey begins as nectar collected by the bees, as they forage from flower to flower. They use their long, tubelike tongues to suck the nectar out of the flowers, which is stored in their stomachs and carried to the beehive. While inside the bee’s stomach the nectar mixes with the proteins and enzymes produced by the bees, converting it into honey.
The bees return to their bee hive, they drop the honey into the beeswax comb and fan their wings over each cell to evaporate and thicken the honey. Finally they cap the honeycomb with wax and move on to the next empty comb, starting all over again.
The flowering season starts in the seaside areas first in early June. We move our hive to the coastal areas of eastern area of Sitia Crete. We searching for the best thyme fields in Sitia, Papadiokampos, Toplou, Palaikastro, Chiona, Kato Zakro, Goudouras and many others places. After the seaside areas we move on the highest mountain of the region of the Lasithi area until August. We move our hives to follow the flower, harvesting as each site as it fills with honey these tactic is very. ……….
Honey Harvest moments..
Honey Extraction & Facilities
Honey extraction is the central process in beekeeping of removing honey from honey comp so that it is isolated in a pure liquid form.
Normally, the honey is stored by honey bees in their beeswax honeycomb; in framed bee hives, the honey is stored on a wooden structure called a frame. The honey frames are typically harvested in the late summer, when they will be most filled with honey. On a completely filled frame, the cells will be capped over by the bees for storage; that is, each cell containing honey will be sealed with a capping made of beeswax.
The first step in the extraction process is to remove all of the cappings. This may be accomplished using an automated uncapper machine or with a manually-operated uncapping knife. Usually, these tools are used together, along with a pronged cappings fork. The removed bits of wax, called cappings, are rich in honey which can be slowly drained off. This ‘cappings wax’ is very valuable and often used to make candles or other products. Automated uncapping machines normally work by abrading the surface of the wax with moving hot knives, which make the process, while messy, easier than doing this task manually.
Once uncapped, the frames are then placed in a honey extractor, which spins them so that most of the honey is removed by centrifugal force. Care must be taken to ensure that all frames are loaded correctly, as the comb is angled slightly upwards to prevent the honey flowing out; if loaded incorrectly, this can also prevent the honey flowing out during extraction. Once extracted, the resulting honey will contain bits of wax and must be passed through a screen so that clean liquid honey results.
The extraction process is typically done inside a specialized production room with all of the necessary..
Sampling – Storage
Now the testing begins! Once the honey is extracted it is stirred in tanks we send samples away for lab testing on a range of quality controls that include: colour, pollen & moisture conductivity, HMF levels, etc). Once the honey has passed through testing protocols it’s off to the packing department.
Standarizing
We place our honey in the appropriate containers and we store the honey at a consistently low temperature until its standarizing date. The use of the latest contemporary equipment allows us to bottle our honey without sacrificing its aroma or taste in the slightest. Initially, we remove foreign bodies like beeswax from the honey, and once it has been left for three days, we proceed with bottling in containers.
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Bottling glass jars
During the bottling the of glass jars
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Placing can jars
Placing the can jars to the bottling machine
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Bottling can jars
The process of bottling can jars