As someone who regularly makes mead, my own small beehive doesn’t produce nearly enough. So once or twice a year I buy 5 gallon buckets of honey. Fortunately the larger beekeeper from whom I buy them likes to receive about half of the cost in apples, quinces and plants, of which I have good plenty. I hope to enter the mead I made two years ago into our local agricultural show next year, since I have in the last twenty years won several first and second prizes for my mead, melomel and liqueurs but haven’t entered since 2020 because Covid. It will be fun to try again!
Would you like a mead recipe? I can put one up in the recipes thread, if I have not done so already.
And honey does last for a long time. Decades ago I was a volunteer on a modern-archaeology project excavating a ruined outback pub, in the cellar of which we found some amazing stuff, ranging from a knife sharpening machine from the mid 1800s to the landlord’s stash of mead and honey. Of course we tried tiny samples of both, and they were excellent.
