© 2024 South Carolina Public Radio
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Ogeechee Honey

Making It Grow logo

Hello Gardeners, I’m Amanda McNulty with Clemson Extension and Making It Grow. If you look at the USC Herbarium’s plant distribution list, you’ll see that only in Jasper and Beaufort Counties has Ogeechee lime, Nyssa ogeche, been documented. It’s greatest distribution is in a swath of Georgia and the upper panhandle of Florida. Bee keepers take hives into these sites,  sometimes floating them on platforms, to produce this very valuable white ogeechee honey. It’s high fructose to sucrose content helps prevent crystallization.  It’s considered a single flower or monofloral honey, and boy, oh, boy, the bee keepers really have to work to produce it. Other plants including other species of nyssa  bloom earlier, bees are allowed to collect from those plants but then new combs must be inserted when the later blooming Ogeechee species  come into flower. The honey is actually analyzed by pollen to insure its truly from just those trees.

Stay Connected
Amanda McNulty is a Clemson University Extension Horticulture agent and the host of South Carolina ETV’s Making It Grow! gardening program. She studied horticulture at Clemson University as a non-traditional student. “I’m so fortunate that my early attempts at getting a degree got side tracked as I’m a lot better at getting dirty in the garden than practicing diplomacy!” McNulty also studied at South Carolina State University and earned a graduate degree in teaching there.