Meet the Vendor: Uwharrie Gold Honey

By Sarah Hurley

A happily married couple with three children, Allison and Rupert Medford opened Uwharrie Gold Honey in 2021 after being consistently disappointed with the honey they found in stores. Biologists by training and avid outdoorsmen, they decided to purchase a couple of bee colonies in 2018, which quickly turned into over a hundred as the years passed. Uwharrie Gold Honey is now a growing side business for the husband-wife pair, but they hope to turn their commitment to stewarding healthy bee colonies and producing high-quality honey into a full-time endeavor soon.

Keeping bees is hard work, Allison says, but highly rewarding. She usually manages the honey processing while Rupert handles the beekeeping. “We take our responsibility of stewarding our bees like any other farmer or rancher does with his livestock. They need care and attention. Our care is rewarded with amazing honey!”

When the honey is ready to harvest off the hives—either in May for their Piedmont honey or sometime in July or August for their Mountain honey—they bring the full boxes, called supers, to their “honey house” where Allison uncaps and extracts the honey using a drum extractor. The honey house stays really hot to make the honey flow more easily. It’s “sticky work,” but the Medfords love it.

They produce different flavors, which come from different nectar sources. Their Basswood and Sourwood varieties are harvested with special care and attention to ensure the honey is predominantly from those trees’ nectar. Their Wildflower honey naturally changes flavor throughout the season depending on what’s blooming. Each year, they make a “honey rainbow” so they can see how the honey color and taste change throughout the season.

Unfortunately, honey is one of the most adulterated food products in the world. Much of the mass-produced honey found in grocery stores is mixed with corn syrup or sugar syrup. Even if you do manage to find pure honey, it can be heat treated until all the good enzymes and healthy benefits are gone. Any “organic” honey in the grocery store is not made in the USA because no USA honey can be labeled organic (bees fly up to five miles to forage, so we can’t control where they go). Typically, “organic” honey is from Brazil or China.

Uwharrie Gold Honey comes only from the purest flower nectar, and it’s never heat treated or microfiltered. Going forward, Allison is interested in adding additional honey products to their lines, such as beeswax candles and honey sticks. Allison and Rupert are proud of their high-quality, naturally healthy honey, which they love sharing with other local families. They take very seriously the knowledge that people choose to spend their hard-earned money on Uwharrie Gold Honey and are excited to begin selling their goods at Minkology.

They admire the shop’s desire to promote North Carolina products: “Our state has so much to offer,” Allison remarks, “and I think it’s great that Minkology has dedicated itself to celebrating North Carolina’s creativity and ingenuity.”

Connect with Allison and Rupert via Facebook, Instagram, or their website.