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As clean as organic honey, as healthy as manuka, as raw a honey as you'll find outside a beehive, but with our uniquely silky smooth texture and subtle fresh flavors.
Buy Raw Honey from Real Beekeepers
Every drop of Wendell Estate Honey is harvested from our own bees and packaged only fresh on our farm by us, the beekeepers. Because our honey is never heated nor gets stored or transported in bulk drums, all of the healthy enzymes remain intact. Because the only “processing” we do is spinning the honey from the honeycomb and straining out larger pieces of wax, all the natural bee pollen and propolis remain in the honey. This is the honey the bees eat and this is the honey the beekeeper eats. We’re happy to share it with you. We’re also honoured that our passion for honey perfection has been recognized by prestigious international awards: the gold medal for world’s best soft-set honey at the 2019 World Beekeeping Awards and a Platinum at the 2020 London International Honey Awards. Wendell Estate Honey is also the first honey in Canada to obtain GenuHoney’s rigorous certificate of honey authenticity. Tim received a lifetime achievement award, The Rathje Memorial Award for outstanding efforts in contributing to Canadian Beekeeping in 2024, awarded by the Canadian Honey Council.
Watch how we get the best honey our bees make from the beehive directly to the jar here.
Let us change the way you think of honey. Eat honey like a beekeeper!
What Our Customers are Saying
Why Our Honey Lacks Organic Certification, And Why That’s Less Important Than Many Think
Organic certification of honey is a very complex, often controversial, and too-frequently suspicious for fraud, or at best, misleading marketing. I have written quite a few words about this in this blog about organic certification of honey in North America, followed by this correction and update on USDA Organic certified honey, and this article on USDA Organic honey. On the below list of reasons why Wendell Estate Honey chooses not to pursue organic certification, you can click to expand the full explanation.
Regardless of the possibility that the bees may have foraged in a non-organic crop, honeybees are remarkable efficient at filtering most possible contaminants out of the honey. Most chemical contaminants, even if they make it into the plants’ nectar, are filtered out by the honeybee and not expressed into the honey. We have dozens to hundreds of laboratory tests evidencing this.
Our bulk honey, like honey from any other honey producer supplying honey packaging companies (remember that we are beekeepers first and that the majority of honey produced on our farm is sold in bulk to other brands that blend it to raise the quality of their product), is routinely tested by third party laboratories as a condition of sale to the packaging company. Our retail Wendell Estate Honey, the finest honey our bees produce in a season, has been tested repeatedly as we export it and enter it into honey quality contests. These tests measure contaminants such as herbicide and pesticide residues, a long list of antibiotics and adulteration with sugar syrups in addition to heavy metals. The results always show that our honey is as clean and pure as any organic honey out there: completely free from pesticides, antibiotics, heavy metals, and sugar syrups.
Organic certification, if legitimate, means that the chance that there is an added contaminant like a pesticide, antibiotic, heavy metal, or syrups of processed sugars in the honey is decreased compared to non-organic honey. The chance of added harmful substances in the honey is lower with authentic organic certification. The actual health benefits (as contrasted with the harms of chemical contaminants) of organic honey are similar to the health benefits of non-oganically-certified honey. These health benefits depend on the contents of the honey which in turn are determined by the floral source, enzymes that the bees add while working nectar into honey, and beekeeping practices. Raw non-organic honey indisputable confers more health benefits than pasteurized, processed organic honey. Like any honey, processed, pasteurized organic honey has decreased levels of healthy enzymes, flavonoids and polyphenols, reduced by the heating of pasteurization.
Organic certification of honey depends on the agricultural management of circular area, called a buffer zone, of more than 28 km2 (>10 square miles) centered on the beehives. Up to 54 “quarter-section” fields may be wholly or partially within this buffer zone. These fields are managed by up to dozens of different farmers, companies and/or landowners. If even one of these land managers uses a proscribed substance like a pesticide or herbicide or other proscribed chemical, or seeds a GMO crop on even a single field within the buffer zone, all of the honey produced by that bee yard is excluded from legitimate organic certification. Towns, villages, golf courses and parks all routinely use substances that would preclude legitimate organic certification of honey produced by bees located within 3km (1.8 miles). The commendable motivation for purchasing organic foods to support more environmentally favorable agricultural practices has decreased effect in the case of buying organic honey.
Many of these countries are not known for rigorous, transparent, fair government certification agencies. However both COR and USDA recognize organic certifications from many other countries. On the commodity market, the price of bulk “organic” honey imported from countries such as Brazil, Mexico and India, the source of much of North America’s organic honey, is lower than the price of non-organic honey produced in North America. Brands buy this cheap, foreign-certified organic honey, import it in bulk, blend and package it domestically and the label it (usually legitimately by current CFIA and USDA regulations) as “USDA Organic” or “COR Organic”.
These private organic certifying agencies are mandated to base certification on COR regulations. But being for independent for-profit companies, there’s a conflicting incentive for them to certify more producers as organic to increase revenue from certifying fees. The Canadian certifying agencies operate at different levels of rigor. As industry insiders we are well aware of some honey producers that have suspicious organic certification. Wendell Estate Honey could almost certainly likewise obtain organic certification for some of our honey produced on Wendell Honey farm and sold as Wendell Estate Honey. However, we don’t believe that it is worth the effort given our operation and the fact that we can fail legitimate certification no matter what we do if a landowner seeds the wrong crop or uses chemicals on any field within 3km of our bee yards (apiaries). We could also likely get certified anyway by one of the less rigorous certifying agencies, like others appear to have done, but in the interests of integrity, we refuse to pursue this.
Were we to get COR organic certification, we could get USDA certification based on the fact that the USDA recognizes COR certification, even though the USDA has no formal guidelines for certification of domestic honey produced by American beekeepers. Again, in the interests of integrity, we refuse to go down this path to obtain USDA-Organic certification.
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Our Guarantee
When you purchase our gourmet raw honey directly from our online store, we guarantee that your honey will arrive, fresh and white with all the award-winning subtle flavours and healthy organic compounds intact and undimished by heat or storage.
How to Keep Your Soft-Set Raw Honey Fresh and Delicious
Wendell Estate Honey is a completely raw, unprocessed, living food. Like any fresh food, raw honey requires appropriate storage to maintain its best quality for as long as possible.
We recommend that you keep an amount of honey that you will use within 2-3 months at room temperature so that the honey is soft and spreadable. Honey that you expect to keep for more than 2-3 months should be stored in a sealed container in the refrigerator (good), or freezer (best).
Is your Wendell Estate honey too firm? You can soften it by putting it in a warm (~ 30°C) water bath for about 30-60 minutes or you can use a spoon or butter knife to stir it for a moment (click here for short video demonstration)
Shipping and Delivery Notes
For Canadian addresses, we ship with CanadaPost. Please allow about a week for delivery in normal times.
For USA addresses we ship with CanadaPost/USPS. Please allow about 2 weeks for delivery in normal times to account for delays at customs.
Please note that the above estimates are for “normal” times. Pandemics, holidays and other unpredictable situations can greatly increase delivery times in some instances.
We don’t currently ship outside of North America, but you can check our International Store Locator above for shops in your country.
We send out tracking information from our website when we ship your order. If you haven’t received tracking information within 2 business days of placing your order, please check your email spam/junk folder.