09/23/2026
Honey Hole Fish Camp is blessed to have a shoreline full of tupelo trees right on our property's waterfront, along with a large variety of citrus trees! Our name derives from both the honey, (tupelo), and our prime fishing spot. Come stay and enjoy it through Vrbo!
(www.Vrbo.com/5034655)
Almost all of the world's tupelo honey comes from one river swamp in one corner of Florida, and the harvest lasts about two weeks. 🍯
The tree is the Ogeechee tupelo, Nyssa ogeche, which grows standing in several feet of water along the Apalachicola River and its sloughs, centered on Gulf County. It blooms in a rush, usually starting in mid to late April, and the window closes fast. Beekeepers strip every earlier drop of honey out of the hives before the bloom so nothing else can contaminate the crop, then race to pull the supers before the t**i and the gallberry come in behind it. Miss the timing by a single week and the whole year's tupelo is gone.
Getting the bees there is the strange part. The swamp floods, so the hives go up on wooden scaffolds roughly twelve feet high, standing out in the water and reached by boat. From the river you see white boxes floating in a green canopy with nothing underneath them. 🐝 L.L. Lanier started the family business at Wewahitchka in 1898 with his brother Arthur. Their first attempt failed outright. They borrowed five hundred dollars from a local farmer, bought more bees and tried again. Five generations later the Laniers are still doing it, and the town still holds a tupelo honey festival every May.
What makes the trouble worth it is chemistry. Tupelo honey runs unusually high in fructose, averaging about forty three percent against roughly twenty seven percent glucose, and that ratio is why it resists crystallizing. A jar can sit in a cupboard for years and stay liquid, pale gold with a faint green cast. Florida has shipped out oranges, cattle, phosphate and sunshine. This is the one thing it makes that almost nowhere else on earth can make at all. 🌿
