Micah Buchanan is a Moloka’i homesteader who transitioned from farming to beekeeping a little over a decade ago.
“I got into honey and found out that just so happened I had the best honey in Hawaiʻi,” he said.
That’s according to judges at the Hawaiian Natural Honey Challenge on Hawaiʻi Island, where his honey won three first-place awards in 2013. He hasn’t entered his honey into the challenge since, but that confirmation was enough to expand his business.
Now, he drives the bumpy, red dirt road through hundreds of acres of kiawe trees to visit his hives along Molokaʻi's south shore. It’s the same land where his grandfather used to grow watermelon and other crops.
“My property is nothing but kiawe,” he explained. “So it's pretty rare to have a place where you can only find kiawe. And that's what makes for that white honey, that kind of sugar-packed honey.”
Buchanan credits the quality of Molokai Gold, known for its light color and luxurious, creamy texture, to a special bottling technique and the kiawe flowers themselves.
“For some reason, I noticed that the color of the flower affects the color of the honey. Like you can see on these trees right here,” he said, stopping his Jeep to get a closer look at the trees. “You can see it a kind of more yellow flower that bloomed early. And then, now you see that white flower that's coming out.”
The white flowers bring the magic.
“If it's all white flowers, I know that a honey is pumping and it's gonna be beautiful and white.”
When arriving at the hives, Buchanan dons a protective bee hat and opens the top of a wooden hive box.
“I can actually see a bunch of green honey in here,” Buchanan said, as he blew wood smoke from a hand-held smoker to calm the bees. The smoke masks a pheromone that bees release to alert other bees of danger, so the smoke helps protect beekeepers from stings.
“Green” honey means the bees are still working on it.
“You see how it’s not capped yet, but there’s honey in it? They’re slowly capping it off. As they fan and get the water out of it, they’ll start capping it off but they’ll keep adding in, filling in all these spots too.”
Once the honey is ready to harvest, it has an indefinite shelf life, Buchanan said.
“So we like to wait till the bees cap it off because they know exactly like what consistency you know honey has to be to make it last forever," he said.
Worker bees are female. They gather nectar, clean the hives and tend larvae bees. Each hive has one queen.
Queens produce male bees, called drones, when they’re nearing the end of their life and ready to produce a new queen for their hive.
“So the males are bigger and don’t have a stinger on them, and they make a different sound when they fly because they’re bigger, they kinda give that ‘brrrrmp,’” Buchanan said, making a noise that sounds like an engine rumble.
Buchanan said not all queen bees are the same. He points to a hive in front of us.
“She’s such a good queen, you can tell by look how much bees are out on that hive.”
Like a farmer would look for positive qualities in seed selection, Buchanan said when he’s ready to grow his bee stock and divide a hive, he does so by choosing high-quality queens.
“Good queens” also keep their hives clean from invasive small hive beetles.
“You see these guys right here?” Buchanan said, pointing to little black bugs on the top of the hive. “So that is small hive beetle — they steal honey and sometimes they slime out your hive. That's one thing that on Moloka’i, we always got to fight. As a beekeeper you deal with wax moth, and in the mainland they got to deal with varroa mite — which we're lucky on Moloka’i we don't have — but we do have this beetle.”
Varroa mites are deadly to honey bees. The pests were detected on Oʻahu in 2007 and Hawaiʻi Island the following year but so far have not spread to other neighbor islands.
He encourages other Moloka’i residents to pursue beekeeping but recommends they get their bee stock locally to protect the island from imported diseases.
Buchanan has about 40 hives. He only markets his honey on Moloka’i — and it always sells out as fast as he can make it.
“It’s pretty much the best honey in the world. I’ll challenge anyone to find a better one,” he laughed.
Along with its flavor, raw, unfiltered honey is known for its medicinal properties, helping to cure lingering coughs or healing wounds, he said.
Buchanan is following in a long history of the island’s fame for its honey.
“Moloka’i used to be one of the top producers of honey in the world,” he said.
Historical records show Moloka’i boasted the “largest apiary in the world” in the early 1900s, producing 200 to 300 tons of honey annually.
And if you’re lucky enough to taste Molokai Gold, you’ll see what all the buzz is all about.
