[majestic music] NARRATOR: The God, Re, wept and the tears from his eyes fell on the ground and turned into a bee.

[majestic music] [bees buzzing] NARRATOR: If you could bottle sunlight, what would it taste like?

It depends on how it got into that bottle.

Honey, for me, has always been a snapshot of place and time.

It's like rings on a tree.

It is literally a moment that it took the bees to pollinate, harvest, create all this honey.

And it's amber in an edible form.

NARRATOR: This is Oregon wildflower honey.

Aged for four months in a bourbon barrel.

I always describe barrel aging as matchmaking.

I put that honey in and I'll go, "Am I going to be at a wedding at the end of these last six to seven months?

Is this a match made in heaven?

Is this like the perfect couple?"

or am I gonna see them in six months and be like, "Yeah, we just decided to be friends."

NARRATOR: Nothing has ever captured brewer and distiller Lee Hedgmon's imagination quite like honey.

Honey is mostly sugar, but can have a surprising array of flavors and smells.

[laughs] So my favorite is buckwheat honey that I get from the Salem area.

And this was a buckwheat honey that smells like, excuse my French, it smells like horse shit, and I absolutely love it because of that.

Because it's so pungent, it lingers no matter what, but it changes.

NARRATOR: Every flower is different so the honey from those flowers is also different.

And if you're serious about exploring honey's potential, you have to learn from the creatures who make it, the bees.

I actually took up beekeeping because I wanted to be more informed.

And the more I learned, the more I grew to love keeping bees, but also I grew to really respect the products that they make.

NARRATOR: Honey bees aren't from the Northwest.

White settlers brought them here on the Oregon Trail.

That beekeeping tradition stretches back thousands of years to the first recorded domestic beehives in ancient Egypt.

Where humans first figured out how to keep bees, breeding them to be more friendly and more productive.

NARRATOR: The bee made her honeycomb and busied herself with the flowers of every plant.

[majestic music] NARRATOR: To understand the flavor potential of honey, We have to understand bees.

And there would be no bees without flowers.

For a flowering plant to reproduce, it needs something to carry pollen from one plant to another.

About 100 million years ago, flowers learned they could get insects to do this for them, in exchange for a little sweet drink.

They're we would like to call floravores.

So they're, bees are getting all their food from flower sources.

So they're getting their carbohydrates from that nectar and they're getting their protein from that pollen resource.

NARRATOR: Flowering plants photosynthesize sunlight into sugary nectar, which pools in the wells at the base of flowers.

Foraging bees gather the nectar with their long tongues stored in a special honey stomach, and bring it back to the hive.

There, they pass the nectar from sister to sister.

They're all female.

Adding chemicals from their honey stomachs to help preserve it.

They fan it with their wings to dry it out and store it in chambers made of wax, secreted from special glands on their abdomens.

Honeybees are the queens of efficiency.

They've really dialed it in over evolutionary time.

NARRATOR: A single bee will make an eighth of a teaspoon of honey in its lifetime, and only lives a few weeks, continually replaced by larvae hatched from hundreds of eggs the queen lays every day.

But while individuals may die, the honeycomb survives, helping ensure the hive can survive the winter.

It's a very altruistic kind of society that they live in, where it's, you know, all for the greater good of the next generation of bees coming out.

And for the survivability of the colony as a whole that they're not necessarily going to see.

NARRATOR: Don't worry, most honey bee hives produce more honey than they need, and responsible beekeepers know how much they can safely take.

Honey bees are just one of hundreds of bee species, most of which don't make honey.

They survive winter by hibernating, but making honeycomb gives honey bees an advantage.

So basically, they've come up with a pantry stable food source that they can tap into during the cold months when there's no flowers that bloom, and utilize that to continue to keep just enough of their colony alive so they can come out roaring in spring.

NARRATOR: To honey bees, honey supports a large workforce, able to stay awake all winter and hop out on early spring days to get the best flowers while other bees are still asleep.

But to us, honey is only a taste of the true value of our relationship with bees.

NARRATOR: And so wax was made and also honey, out of the tears of Re.

[upbeat music] Oregon honey is special because there's so many great varieties that come from this state.

It's a very diverse agricultural state and there is a wide variety of crops.

So the bees love that.

They love multifloral opportunities to pollinate all these crops, and so, it really is unique.

NARRATOR: Apples, cherries, pears, many iconic Northwest crops couldn't exist without the tireless pollination efforts of bees.

And all of those tiny bee tongues gathering nectar, it adds up to about 3 million pounds of honey each year in Oregon.

Our legacy is that we are the largest honey packer in the region, and that's involving buying the honey, packaging it, and distributing it.

All the way to artisan fermented honey, which is sort of like a vinegar product that we actually discovered in Thailand, all the way to a brown butter honey ghee that's amazing as a spread.

NARRATOR: But sometimes simple and raw is best.

[upbeat music] So our Oregon raw honey from hive to bottle.

The beekeeper harvests that honey, so they take off the caps of the combs and use an extractor to spin out the honey from those frames and they drain it into barrels.

We'll bottle it, we'll package it up into cases, take it over to our distribution center, and then wait for the orders to roll in.

NARRATOR: Oregon isn't the biggest honey producing state, North Dakota is the champion by a long shot.

But what we lack in volume, we make up for in variety and surprise.

Lee's wildflower honey took on a citrus flavor.

Later, this might turn into a creamed, spreadable honey, but for now, it's the perfect sweetener for a summer cocktail.

[upbeat music] That's good.

[laughs] Honey is a very cool substance.

We'd never be able to go to flowers with a little syringe and pull out all this nectar resource and then condense it down.

They do this amazing work to go grab that nectar, put it into an easy exploitable way for us humans to tap into so we can really taste the floral world around us.

So I mean, that's kinda magic.

NARRATOR: The sweetness of honey is the taste of photons generated in the core of the sun, transmitted through space, converted into sugars, gathered by bees, passed from sister to sister, infused, fanned, and stored, and waxed.

Each step changes it, giving it a local flavor and creating a bridge from our breakfast tables to the sun, the cosmic powerhouse of life on Earth.

[majestic music] [waves susurrating] [bees buzzing]