Honey is expensive

I am making Joe's quick grape mead. I just racked for the first time, and tried a little bit. I have never tasted mead before...but this was amazing! I am trying to have some self-control here and wait another 2 weeks for aging. I can't imagine what that will taste like.

I want to make more meads, but honey is soooo expensive! Where can I get good honey for cheap? Do you think $10 for 2.5 lbs is the best deal I can get?

walmart (great value) brand honey is pure honey. $7 for 3 lbs. it's what i use for my meads

yes, i like that price a bit better!

Your best bet is to find a local honey guy. I stumbled upon mine and just bought 3 gallons of honey for $99, which I think is a decent deal.

It's pretty expensive in the UK, too. There is a honey farm locally that vends both self-produced and imported stuff. The cheapest honey they have is "blended" which is a little over £5 (~$8) for 3lbs but own honey is twice that. My favourite is "Greek honey" which weighs in at a mighty £12 (~$20) for 3lbs.

As with the US, supermarket honey can be pretty cheap. Asda ("part of the Walmart family") own brand is about £3 (~$5) for 3lbs. I haven't really tried it, but I might have a go when making a mead that has another, overriding flavour.

Another option is to try the Amish, if you have an Amish community near you. You can often get good prices from them.

Bush_84 said:

Your best bet is to find a local honey guy. I stumbled upon mine and just bought 3 gallons of honey for $99, which I think is a decent deal.

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+1 to trying to find a local apiary and buying in some bulk. Invest in some cheap gallon jugs of wine a la Carlo Rossi and you can use these as containers to divvy out amounts easier to work with. Another option is quart size mason jars which you can pick up fairly cheaply in many places.

And 3 gals (~36 lbs) for $99 is a pretty good deal...I pay $200 for 5 gals from my local beekeeper, so that's about 50 cents cheaper per pound!

I'll be making my first mead tomorrow, with honey from my first harvest from my backyard hive. I harvested five gallons four months after establishing the hive. I'm planning on making at least one batch of mead from each honey harvest and giving the rest of the honey to friends and family.

Craigslist is a great place to find local honey and a local beekeeper.

GTG

Local varies greatly; the most expensive honey I've ever seen was local, and wasn't anything to brag about, and the cheapest honey I've found of late is also local and is raw/unfiltered and the best I've ever had. Granted, when I refer to the quality, that's heavily skewed by my own personal tastes.

Costco is about as cheap as I can find clover honey. Usually around $2.20 / lb.

Establish your own hives and then you will think the others sell their honey too cheap.

Just as a suggestion when you buy the honey ask what variety (floral source) it is. Each variety has its own unique taste.

Interesting, I live in Idaho and the average retail price is about $2/lb and local honey runs from $2/lb to $10/pint... Of course all we really have here is clover and wildflower honey. Still makes a great mead and is well worth the price in my opinion.

Sam's Club here in Phoenix - 5 lbs for $10.59. Same company that sells the specialty honey by the gallon...

Bush_84 said:

Your best bet is to find a local honey guy. I stumbled upon mine and just bought 3 gallons of honey for $99, which I think is a decent deal.

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+1. Plus your buying local. My apiarists has 7 different varieties of honey from light to dark, you can get a wide range of flavors in mead from these different varieties.

@ kc_in_wv: "Establish your own hives and then you will think the others sell their honey too cheap."

Absolutely. Just the startup costs, especially if you have to buy all the necessary equipment, plus the bees at around $80/3-lbs.

As an alternative for those interested parties,
www.grit.com/top-bar-hive

It's designed for hive longevity and sustainability, NOT for maximum honey yields. You can modify a lot here; you'll quickly see different things you'd change or add (like a queen excluder - at the start it seems like an easy thing, but it gets a bit more challenging when theory meets practical application). As for cost, if you use all scrap and capture or attract a spring swarm, you'll spend nothing but your time.

Sorry if this is off-topic, I thought it might be useful to those that have let cost stop them from taking up beekeeping.

P.S. - not sure, but I think that if you download/save that pdf file you may not be able to access that site again? IDK...