When Lloyd Jones’s daughters began to suffer from debilitating eczema, he watched helplessly as creams and treatments continued to prove ineffective. That’s until he discovered the benefits of a product that he realised he could harvest himself, if he gave up his successful career in banking, moved across the world to WA and became a full time beekeeper. Impressively, that’s exactly what he did. Excited by the healing potential of the jarrah and marri honey local to the Margaret River region, Lloyd decided to establish a sustainable honey brand to help eczema sufferers and honey lovers alike. Still a young business, the Apia Honey range currently includes organic raw jarrah and marri honey alongside a healing honey infused balm, with more products in the pipeline.

In learning about the Apia Honey process, we learnt that this family run business creates so much more than exceptional honey, and goes above and beyond to protect the bees that produce it and the planet they inhabit. We spoke with Lloyd about the healing properties of jarrah and marri honey, and how Apia Honey is taking a holistically sustainable ethos and approach. 

On a mission to inform 

Honey is a food that everyone’s familiar with, but unfortunately a lot of people don’t understand the benefits, or the importance of choosing the right product. The more we learn about the benefits of jarrah and marri honey, the more passionate we become about spreading the word. 

The health benefit outcomes are really extensive, really interesting, and really exciting for beekeepers in WA who want to help this local product really thrive. 

Personally, I’ve seen how jarrah and marri honey can heal stubborn, extreme eczema, and research from UTS has linked jarrah and marri honey to significantly improved gut health. The research is continuing to grow, and we’ll keep improving our products and sharing them with the world to help other people access this natural superfood.

Antimicrobial and antibacterial benefits

One area of research involves measuring the amount of antibacterial and antimicrobial activity with the honey itself, and has found that on an antimicrobial and antibacterial level, jarrah and marri honey is higher than manuka. Manuka honey is thought of as the gold standard superfood, but the benefits seen from jarrah and marri honey are more extensive and impactful.

Hydration and healing

Honey has been used to improve skin health for centuries, especially in Indigenous communities where it was used to treat wounds. As a hydrating agent, it works as a humectant: attracting water and locking moisture into the skin.

Honey is also a go-to cure across cultures for coughs and throat irritations, used as a remedy on its own or mixed with lemon water. What’s important to note though, is that so much of the honey bought and sold today lacks all of the health benefits because of the way it’s produced. Large scale producers heat honey to speed up the manufacturing process, but as a result, the antimicrobial and antibacterial benefits are stripped away. Raw honey removes that heating process, so the honey stays intact: it’s coming from the hive into the jar, complete with the natural, beneficial byproducts such as propolis and bee pollen which are stripped away by commercial producers.

Happy bees

As most people know, bees feed on pollen and nectar, so often through winter time, their food source dries up. Most honey producers feed their bees sugar syrup to keep them making honey through winter, but it goes against our ethos to feed the bees artificial food. We decided to migrate the hives north here in WA to where things are flowering through the colder months, so the bees still get that diverse diet and range of flowers, rather than being fed a limited and unnatural diet of sugar syrup.

Happy planet

For us, operating a sustainable business is about making a commitment to sustainability, and following through with that at every level of the business: in the way you recycle, the way you treat animals, the way you treat the earth and the way you treat other humans. We decided to start planting trees because to us it makes sense to operate in a way that’s harmonious with nature. Intrinsically, the brand is linked to trees because we rely on trees and flowers to produce food for our bees. We wanted to create a business model which, if scaled, wouldn’t be stripping the resources from nature… to replenish the earth so there are trees around for future generations, so if the business thrives, the environment thrives too.

The choice to use recycled plastic jars was also very conscious, very intentional. Everyone associates premium honey with glass, but glass is heavy, so from a shipping and freight perspective, results in a bigger carbon footprint. Also, it’s a new material. Glass is very recyclable but producing a glass jar involves people mining the silicone and the sand, and stripping more resources from the environment. From a marketing perspective, using glass jars made sense, but from a sustainability perspective it didn’t, and that’s the approach we’ve decided to take. We’ve got all of this plastic sitting there, so we shouldnt’ be producing more – repurposing plastic for another use provides a solution rather than adding to the problem.

To learn more about the Apia Honey story, you can read their brand profile here, and you can stock up on sustainable, superfood honey and skincare at apiahoney.com.au