Astor Apiaries' Nick Hoefly is an expert on honey bees and, of course, honey. Cheddar News' Michelle Castillo checked out the hives to learn everything you ever wanted to know about honey ahead of Bee's Knees Week.

<div class="block">Astor Apiaries&#39; Nick Hoefly is an expert on honey bees and, of course, honey. Cheddar News&#39; Michelle Castillo checked out the hives to learn everything you ever wanted to know about honey ahead of Bee&#39;s Knees Week.</div>

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Everything You Wanted to Know About Honey From Astor Apiaries

Queens based as a doesn't just take care of bees around the city. It also sells its own fresh local New York honey. Michelle Castillo is on the scene to get a taste. So yes, I'm back here with Nick Heffley. He's the owner of Astro Apiary. So, Nick, we went to the hives earlier and now we're going to sample the honey. But let's start with something simple. What is honey actually? Yeah. So honey is actually just a sugary substance that flowers produce to encourage pollinators to come by. They get pollinated and the pollinators get a little treat to either take back home or to eat right there on the spot for the honey bees. They're taking it all back to the hive and storing it. So, you know, you have your own New York City honey. What? So what I understand, you know, everyone knows that honey is sweet but other things around can influence the flavor. So can you tell me a little bit more about that process? Sure. So honey is a whole spectrum of flavors and colors. Our honey tends to be more orange and yellow. It's very bright in flavor and this is all due to the majority of it coming from linden trees. So this is very much a linden honey. However, there's lots of other decorative flowers out there that end up in this. So we would call it a wild flower honey. Let's try some. Can you tell me a little bit about the flavors of wind and trees? Well, uh a lot of people who try this uh, since a little citrus, um which is interesting and then the really cool thing I like about this. Yeah. Uh is it's got kind of a cooling minty aftertaste, which is really nice. So you have another kind of honey here. This one looks a little more solid. What's the difference? So both of these are raw honey. This just happens to be a honey that's crystallized a bit more and crystallization. Crystallization is just a characteristic of raw honey. All honey will crystallize over time. Typically processed honey does not crystallize. So they filter out a lot of the things that cause those crystals. So yeah, this has less citrus. I would say it's more of a caramel taste. It is. It is and it's a nice, thick, thick texture to it for sure. So as I understand it, bees knees week is coming up. What is that? And how does it help the honey bees which are endangered right now if I understand? Yeah. So my friends at Bar Hill, which is where this honey is from. They do this great initiative. Every September called Bees Knees Week. It's all about putting pollinator habitat back into nature. So when during the week of September 22nd, October 1st, if you go to a bar, take a picture of your bees knees cocktail and hashtag it with bees knees week. Bar hill is going to plant square feet for every post. So this can be a lot of square footage, a lot of acreage depending on how many posts are out there. You have some of this Bar Hill product. Now, if I understand this is the gin, let's sample some of that and it's infused with honey. As I understand it is, they actually finish this gin with honey raw honey that we just sampled right now. And it's a very, very smooth gin. It's just like you get all the nice nuances of the honey, but just also with an excellent gin. You know, it's very smooth and you definitely get the sweet after taste. Absolutely. This is one of my favorite gins for sure. And they also do a Tom cat G. This is a little bit more of a whiskey taste. It is, this one is barrel aged. So that's why you get that beautiful amber color. And for people who like whiskey and maybe not so much gin, this is really a great crossover to kind of get yourself into the gin world. Well, we're going to stay here and hang out with the bees as I understand the female bees back in those hives. But if you want to try some honey for yourself, definitely check out as a back to you in the studio. Amazing looks delicious Castillo on the ground there and you can go to bar health dot com to find out more about these news week.