Our First Honey Harvest!

We’ve been working towards this moment for a very long time! Our first honey harvest in Japan! It’s been a long process to get to this point: moving across the world to Japan, working with Japanese professionals, developing a business plan, incorporating our business, receiving the Startup Visa, completing all the steps necessary to successfully turn that into the Business Manager visa, and working every day to meet our dreams and goals.

So, today, we celebrate our first honey jars going on to store shelves. Please enjoy this little gallery showing a little glimpse into our harvest. We start by inspecting frames from our honeybee colonies that have excess honey to share. The frames that have honey, we pull for processing. The honey is tested for sugar content and viscosity using a refractometer. We cut off the caps from the honey cells, and use the two-frame manual honey spinner to extract the honey. We strain the honey two times, before putting it into jars, sticking on labels, then off they go to the market!

We have a long list of people to thank for helping us get here. Our local Honeybee Sensei continues to show us his methods for beekeeping, which we’re following very closely, in order to understand how to combine his best practices with our best practices. We are so thankful he reached out to us shortly after we arrived on Ōmishima last year. We’re happy to have him as a mentor and friend.

And of course, we couldn’t have done it without the help of our honeybees! Bee health and happiness is always top priority, because without them, we don’t have anything.

We decided the first batch would only be our smallest jars: 140g. Just look at these cute little jars!

Benton Homestead honey can be shipped directly to your doorstep, throughout Japan! We use JapanPost Yupack for fast discount shipping. Please use the shopping cart feature, or browse all the listings by visiting our complete online shop. We also accept payment via Japanese bank transfer, so please message us for details.