A quick search suggests that the average American uses about 1.3 pounds of honey per year. If I’m 40 years old, and guess that I might live to be 80, that’s only 52 pounds of honey, which I could easily buy in bulk. Honey doesn’t expire, and even assuming the price doesn’t skyrocket from bee die-offs, inflation alone will make the price go up over time.
Does it make sense to buy all the rest of the honey I’ll ever need for the rest of my life, right now?
Having had a 50lb bucket of honey I can tell you that honey use goes up dramatically because you say to yourself “well I have so much I can just use it for this, and that, and a little more on my toast…” and then friends come around asking for a little here and a little there. Unless you can be super disciplined in a way that I cannot, 50 pounds will not last more that a couple years.
Once Honey 2.0 comes out in 20 years, your stock in Honey 1.0 will be worthless :(
Just crush up Viagra in it and sell it as sex honey.
I clearly use more than the average amount of honey then. Most of it to make mead.
Honey doesn’t expire but it crystalises giving it a different texture. You’d also have to check in on what happens to decades old honey
Not a lot. there was some honey in the tomb of an Egyptian mummy and they are it when they excavated him.
Do you really want to carry your lifetime supply of honey around with you every time you move apartment?
What other foodstuffs are you going to buy your lifetime supply of? Dried goods? Tins? You could get yourself a winnebago and fill it with all your lifetime’s worth of food or something, which would make lugging it all around with you forever easier. Just hope nobody nicks it.
Carry it around? You just find a tree. Nice hollow tree and hide it in there. Everyone knows it’s how you store honey.
Lifetime supply of honey for me is one fairly small jar, except that one time I had a weird craving for honey in the comb, so I ordered a square of it and ate it like a sandwich. I guess I saw bears doing it and thought it looked tasty.
If storage space were free and limitless, maybe. Honey keeps forever in principle but that doesn’t mean your barrel could never be contaminated, broken into by bugs or rodents, etc.
Personally, I enjoy buying different varieties of honey, especially as it’s a craft which has been getting more popular and really taking off in “local food” culture. I don’t want to commit to a barrel of any one thing, and I’m also fairly sure that the honey I could buy in a barrel is not going to be the one I’d most enjoy, but some over filtered, over processed stuff.
So I say nay.
I don’t eat like this because I’m not fat
All the honey I’ve ever bought has crystallized before I could get through the small bottle. Yeah, you can heat it, it’s a pain to have to deal with when I just want to use it. I’d rather buy what I need fresh.
One of our local honey dudes does 8 oz honey jars that are wider than they are tall. I like those.
The bee die-offs, that one typically hears about, has nothing to do with honey bees. Honey bees don’t show any signs of going extinct. Its may of the other bee species, which are dying off. And that is bad because of the species liking different specific plants, which often rely on this bee species to be pollinated.
Some of this is because domesticated bees are filling the roles wild bees take. Some is temperature based, like bees just die at something like 55 or 60 degrees C. Hooray climate collapse!
Yeah - a lot of “save the bees” narratives omit the fact that honey bees are not indigenous to the US and displaced some species.
We should be just as concerned for wasps, who are essential to pollination.
i was with you until you got to the murder flies.
Baeus are absolutely adorable though, how could anyone hate a chubby wingless wasp?
Cookoo wasps are gorgeous.
Many solitary wasp species incapacitate and lay eggs in spiders - the spider bodies make tasty snacks for the babies. If you don’t like spiders - the enemy of your enemy?
It’s really only the social wasps that are aggressive though - which makes sense. They will sting and defend their hive with their lives, because that’s where their sisters and nieces live! But all wasp species are essential. We need paper wasps for pollination - even if a Polistes sting will ruin your day.
The latter wasp reminds me of what I was told is the “Jade beetle,” but which is apparently a “figeater beetle.”
If you like the green/iridescent, sweat bees are beautiful.
Common names for insects are very regional honestly. Ie, in my locale, we call “crane flies” “skeeter eaters.”
Or how “June bug”/“June beetle” covers hundreds of species.
Haven’t seen this mentioned yet so:
The honey may not expire, but the container you store it in could. I’d be very concerned about plastic disintegrating and/or leeching into the honey. Glass would be better for that, but it’s also really heavy compared to plastic, so you’d need more, smaller containers instead of one giant tub.
Glass would also be better for heating it to melt crystals.
I would agree with you but I’m like 25% microplastic (and 8% regular plastic) so I figure what harm will be done has already been done.
It’s surprising that Bender has yet to say “I’m 40% plastic!”
Sure you could. But I’ll offer a different perspective
All honey tastes different from different producers and areas, you’ll be missing out on some wonderful honey flavors if you buy that much in bulk. If it’s purely for sweetening, sure fine, do it. But if you want the flavor of honey, check out a farmers market and see what you’d be missing out on with bulk.
I’ve also heard that honey helps to confer resistance to allergies to things that were in the area where the honey was made. As such, OP might be missing out on environmental defense by not diversifying.
The idea did occur that I’d better be damn sure that I like whatever honey I’ll be eating for the rest of my life.
A quick search suggests that the average American uses about 1.3 pounds of honey per year.
I think this is a case of people not eating honey and bringing the average way down.
My current SO puts honey in her tea and goes though about a pound and a half per month or about 18lbs per year.
It might sound like a lot but 24oz over an average of 30 days is less than an Oz of honey per day or 2 tablespoons across 4 cups of tea every day.I’ll balance her out - zero most years. It doesn’t taste good enough to start adding sweetener to things
The average added sugar consumption for American adults is about 70g per day, which works out to be 25.6 kg (56.2 lbs) per year. People can shift their source of sweetener and consume a dramatically higher amount of honey without necessarily having a diet that is all that different from the national average.
As a kid we had a neighbor that ran a bee-brothel and had hives all over the region. Since his hives would just sit on un-used corners of farmland, he would offer some honey annually as ‘rent’. (He was also generous with his boat so a couple waterskiing trips were also on the table).
We (2 parents, 4 kids) would get a 5 gallon can of honey every other year or so.
That has been over 45 years now and my father is still working through that supply. We put it in sealed mason jars and it has remained good all this time.
Yeah, then turn it into mead
