Nothing compares to tupelo honey or the persistence of the people who harvest the rare delicacy from the swamps of Georgia and the Florida Panhandle.
Words by Jessica Bradley Wells | Photos by Jessica Bradley Wells & Aileen Perilla
November 30, 2021
Gary Adkison stood at the back of his pickup truck with a bee smoker resting on the tailgate. The May sky swirled with gray clouds — the kind of weather that makes bees cranky — so he stuffed bits of pine straw into the smoker to feed a slow-burning fire in the canister.
Wearing a veiled hat to protect his face, Gary walked his 11-year-old grandson, Brodie, to the rows of hives and blanketed the boxes in smoke. This calmed the bees enough to remove the honey-filled frames, though thousands flew through the haze.
Gary and Brodie didn’t get stung, but later I asked Gary if he gets stung often. In his thick Florida Panhandle accent that sometimes makes “bee” sound like “bay,” he said he does. He showed me his hands, dotted with little black sting marks like sharpened pencil tips. He said most of the time bees don’t want to sting. They just like to check you out.
“I’m not a bee whisperer or anything, but I have respect for them,” he said. “They’re working for me, and I’m working for them.”
It was Monday, May 10, and he was harvesting their prized tupelo honey.
Gary and his wife, Pam Palmer (though everyone, including Gary, calls her Miss Pam), keep bees in this sandy field in Wewahitchka, Florida. Their operation is small compared with those of commercial beekeepers, who can have thousands of hives, but with about 100 hives between the field and their backyard closer to town, the couple harvests several varieties of honey, including ti-ti, wildflower, and red.
Tupelo, however, is the most valuable and rare.
Gary Adkison feeds pine straw into a smoker, a small device used to calm bees. He decided to try beekeeping in 2012 after he lost everything in the Great Recession. Photo by Jessica Bradley Wells
Though most people think tupelo honey comes from Mississippi, it actually comes from the swamp-loving white tupelo tree. White tupelos only grow densely enough to produce honey in south Georgia and northwest Florida. While some beekeepers in Georgia make tupelo honey, most of it comes from the Panhandle — and more specifically, Gulf County.
Wewa, as locals call it — about 30 minutes from Port St. Joe on the Gulf of Mexico near Florida’s largest river, the Apalachicola — is the unofficial tupelo honey capital. Beekeepers have set up hives in the swamps here since the 1800s to capture honey that has a color, taste, and chemistry that sets it apart from all other honeys.
The first Tupelo Honey Festival was in 1941, and ever since, thousands have gathered in Wewahitchka, population 1,800, to buy and sample honey from local beekeepers.
Each beekeeper’s tupelo honey will taste a little different depending on the strength of the blooms near their hives, and every beekeeper will say theirs is the best.
The week before the festival, which takes place annually over the third weekend in May, is a busy time for beekeepers. Gary and Miss Pam welcomed me to their honey house anyway to learn how to sling honey. I didn’t know yet what that meant, but I was eager to find out.
Gary and Miss Pam’s honey house is a small building the color of a bright beach sky. Gary’s dad bought the land, just outside the city limits, more than 50 years ago. Before Gary built the honey house, the land only had trees and a garage-sized wooden chicken coop that sat unused for a decade.
For most of his life, Gary, 54, built houses for a living. When the economy collapsed in 2008, he lost everything. He decided to try beekeeping in 2012.
“Beekeeping was actually me getting closer to God,” he said. “I started getting closer to nature and thinking, ‘What can I do?’”
He realized beekeeping could be more than a hobby and started making honey to sell. Now that the housing industry has recovered, Gary is back to building for his main source of income, but he and Miss Pam continue the Wewahitchka tradition of making tupelo honey with family as part of their business, Blue-Eyed Girl Honey, named for their granddaughter Madi.
When I walked into the honey house five days before the Tupelo Honey Festival, Gary was busy moving 100-pound boxes of honey-laden frames. Instead of the face covering from the bee yard, he wore a camouflage visor with a flat, knife-sharpened carpenter pencil tucked in the band.
About 60 of the wooden boxes he’d brought in from the bee yard the day before needed processing to be ready for the festival.
I promised to stay out of the way, but he said he’d prefer it if I didn’t.
“Actually,” he said, “we need your help.”
The work they did that week earned the bulk of their annual sales. Tupelo trees bloom for only two to three weeks each year starting in mid- to late April, so bees have a short window to gather nectar to make sweet, sticky gold.
Beekeepers have even less time to collect it.
Bees are efficient workers. They visit hundreds of flowers a day to collect nectar and produce honey that will feed their hive. Like all animals, they’re looking for the most food for the least amount of work. When the tupelo blooms are at their peak, bees will pass on other flowers in the area to instead collect tupelo, which produces more nectar.
Because bees prioritize tupelo over other flowers, the honey from hives near tupelo trees will be mostly from tupelo, with a little gallberry and assorted wildflowers mixed in. Experts can tell by the taste and light color if it’s mostly tupelo, and pollen analysis in a lab can tell an exact percentage — local beekeepers agree that if the percentage is above 60, it’s good tupelo honey.
I asked Miss Pam if she could tell by smell whether it’s tupelo or not.
“Yes,” she said, “it’s sort of like a sommelier and wine. It’s only through experience we can tell. I can smell when bees start making honey in the hive, but I can also smell if it’s tupelo.”
As Gary, Miss Pam, and Brodie moved frames from the boxes, they explained how to get the honey out of the hive and into a bottle.
Gary and Miss Pam’s grandson, 11-year-old Brodie, helps scratch frames and prepare them for the metal extractor. He got his first bee suit when he was 2, and said beekeeping is “fun, and the honey’s good.” Photo by Jessica Bradley Wells
Gary first met Miss Pam when she was his children’s school guidance counselor. In 2015, he reached out to her on Facebook to ask if she’d be interested in helping his beekeeping business. She said yes, and things went so well they got married two years later.
Each wooden box has 10 frames inside. The rectangular spruce wood frames have a honeycomb interior, and each cell is a storage unit that bees fill with the nectar they’ve collected. They then fan the cell with their wings to remove excess water until the honey has thickened to the right viscosity. Bees cap the filled cells with their wax so they can eat the honey later in winter.
People harvest honey by removing it from thousands of these capped cells. The honey house is like an assembly line with boxes at the start. Brodie pulled a frame wider than he was from the box and craned his neck to look at both sides. He smiled when he found one with lots of honey.
He slid the frame into a metal device as if he were putting bread in a toaster. Inside, chains rattled the frame enough to break the wax caps.
A lever lifted the frame, and Brodie checked it for unopened cells. If he found them, he scraped the frame with a wire brush — known as scratching — to remove the white, waxy coating and reveal the amber shimmer of honey.
I helped scratch so the family could focus on processing more frames.
With speed, Brodie placed the scratched frame in a metal bin, where it waited for the next step: slinging. To sling, 30 frames are moved into an extractor — a silver, cylindrical machine that works like a top-load washer on spin. With the extractor loaded, Brodie hopped on a step stool to reach the start button.
“Papa,” Brodie said, “we’re ready!”
He mashed the red button, and the machine spun fast enough to sling the honey from the open cells onto the interior walls of the extractor. Slowly, the thick, golden harvest trickled into a mesh-covered vat below the floor, where it waited to be strained once more before bottling.
Impressed, I mentioned how well Brodie knew the process. Gary told me that Brodie, like most of their 15 grandchildren, has been around the honey house since he was a baby. He got his first bee suit at 2 years old.
“I’ve been doing this a long time,” Brodie said with a smile. “It’s fun, and the honey’s good.”
He’s right. Tupelo is very good.
I brought a jar home and set it on my kitchen windowsill to see its color as the sunlight filtered through. The raw honey looks even lighter and clearer than it did dripping from the frames. It’s almost the color of clarified butter, with a faint greenish tint. I can see the tiniest of black specks from pollen and bee fragments that were too small for the strainer to catch.
I scoop a spoonful to put on yogurt, and as I dangle it over my bowl, about half clings to the spoon while the rest drips in syrupy ribbons that briefly hold their shape before settling as a golden pool at the top of the bowl.
The flavor is delicate and complex. With a mild sweetness and hint of flowers, it lacks the tang that lingers after a spoonful of more common honey like wildflower. Because its flavor is so recognizable, it's best used as the focal point of a meal — drizzled on a biscuit, swirled in a cocktail, or served with cheese rather than mixed into a recipe where its flavor might get lost.
Though most people think tupelo honey comes from Mississippi, it actually comes from the swamp-loving white tupelo tree. Pure tupelo is one of the few honeys that keep for decades without crystallizing. The unusual balance of sugars in tupelo gives it a higher ratio of fructose to glucose than most honeys.
Tupelo is meant to be savored.
It’s OK to take your time finishing the bottle, too, because pure tupelo is one of the few honeys that keep for decades without crystallizing. The unusual balance of sugars in tupelo gives it a higher ratio of fructose to glucose than most honeys.
But it is not cheap. A pound of tupelo can sell from $14 to more than $30. Its price is determined by its flavor and packaging, but it’s also labor intensive to produce, and in short supply. The trees grow in a limited region and bloom for a short time, and bees produce an inconsistent amount of the rare honey each year.
Brian Bertonneau bottles honey from at least a dozen beekeepers to produce more than 10 varieties of honey for Smiley Honey. Tupelo is his favorite.
He describes tupelo like Juicy Fruit gum because of the burst of flavor, but, he said, it’s more refined, with a buttery finish that coats the tongue.
“If you said I could only have one honey for the rest of my life, it would be tupelo for sure.”
The white tupelo tree, Nyssa ogeche, grows to about 50 feet tall and blooms profusely in the right conditions. The Apalachicola River’s 100 miles are perfect for the tree because its shallow, swampy banks and sloughs have slow-moving water to keep the trees’ feet wet and grounded in nutrient-rich soil.
Tupelo, part of the dogwood family, has an ashy-gray bark with deep wrinkles and a base that widens near the ground like a pair of bell bottoms. Smooth bright green oval leaves splay from its branches. The tree produces a small, lime-like fruit from August to October, but in April it sprouts flowers, from which bees gather the nectar for honey.
The blossoms start as spiky green balls, and a tiny white flower emerges from each spike. The cluster is so delicate that winds or rain can knock the flowers off and ruin the honey crop. Beekeepers watch the weather and pray the flowers will hang on.
But good fortune in April doesn’t guarantee a good honey flow. The weather the year before affects honey, as trees produce less nectar in drier years.
When hurricanes tear through the Panhandle, they take the trees with them. 2018’s category 5 Hurricane Michael leveled towns on the coast and destroyed buildings and trees as far away as Georgia, along with Florida’s 2019 tupelo honey crop.
Gary and Miss Pam continue the Wewahitchka tradition of making tupelo honey a family business; Blue-Eyed Girl Honey is named for their granddaughter Madi.
Bees have their own problems. Researchers are beginning to learn how climate change and variations in weather patterns are affecting bees’ food and habitat availability, but they’re also in danger of predators like black bears (which are plentiful in the Panhandle), diseases like those caused by parasitic Varroa mites that wipe out colonies, and habitat destruction and pesticide use as more people move to Florida.
Human impacts like dredging and decreased water flow have changed the river’s ecosystem, too, resulting in fewer tupelo trees. Scientists have observed that they’re not growing back as quickly, and they’re concerned that when tupelos die off, we won't see the same number come back in their place.
Gary was lucky after Hurricane Michael. By some miracle, none of his hives were destroyed by the wind or fallen trees, but when he went to check on the bees days later, hungry black bears had eaten 77 of his 100 hives.
“I thought I had dodged a bullet,” he said, “just to open a whole new can of worms. I didn’t make a single spoonful of honey the next year.”
He went from his best year in 2018 — with seven 600-pound drums — to none in 2019, and one in 2020. This year, he made two. All beekeepers can do is hope for the best and collect what they can.
In 1971, Van Morrison released “Tupelo Honey,” where he compared his love to the honey’s sweetness. Nobody knows whether a visit to the Florida Panhandle inspired this song and album title or whether he simply liked the sound of the syllables, but we do know the song was so popular it positively influenced tupelo honey’s reputation.
While demand for tupelo honey grew, most people assumed — and still do — that it comes from Elvis’ hometown in Mississippi. Tupelo, Mississippi, is named instead for its plentiful black tupelo (Nyssa sylvatica) trees, which produce a darker, more bitter honey that is often sold in bulk to sweeten candies or cereals.
In 1997, Wewahitchka came into the spotlight when Peter Fonda played a beekeeper making tupelo honey in the film “Ulee’s Gold.” It premiered at the Sundance Film Festival and earned Fonda a Golden Globe. Ben Lanier, whose family has made tupelo honey in Wewahitchka since 1898, taught director Victor Nuñez how to work bees and provided his land for filming. Lanier and his wife, Glynnis, attended the Sundance premiere, where Robert Redford introduced the film as Nuñez presented Redford with a jar of Lanier’s honey onstage.
Between the sandy field and their backyard closer to town, Gary and Miss Pam have about 100 hives. One day, Gary hopes to have 1,000.
A bee barge in Gary’s backyard along the Chipola River in Wewahitchka, Florida, a tributary of the Apalachicola River. For decades, bee barges — floating docks with platforms 20 to 30 feet above ground — were the only way to make tupelo honey, as they were high enough to avoid flooding and low enough that the tupelo blooms could hover over the hives.
I spoke to Lanier by phone about his family’s tradition of harvesting tupelo, and he said with or without that attention, tupelo honey has long been a delicacy.
Lanier credits his mother, Martha, with the honey’s first and most influential advertising campaign. Starting in the 1940s, she placed ads about tupelo honey in publications like Prevention Magazine. Her article-length ads explained the unusual characteristics of tupelo honey, and by the 1970s, when UPS was available to every address in the continental United States, she shipped 5-pound plastic mason jars of their honey to individual buyers throughout the country.
“Every little bit helps, but we stand on our own. My mother,” Lanier said, “did more to promote tupelo honey than anyone who’s ever lived.”
Although there are more than 4,000 species of native bees in the United States, Europeans brought today’s honey bees in the 1600s. It’s hard to say when honey bees reached Florida, but naturalist William Bartram traveled the state in the 1770s and wrote about the many he saw and how pioneers and Native Americans used honey to sweeten water.
Florida’s first major beekeeping operation was established in 1872 near Daytona and its second in Wewahitchka by S.S. Alderman. By 1898, Alderman had 1,300 colonies in his orange groves and another 2,500 in the swamps. When others heard of Alderman’s success, they wanted to come to Florida, too. But living along the Apalachicola River was not easy.
Lanier’s great-grandfather, born in 1849, worked with Alderman before his son, L.L. Lanier Sr., started the current family honey house in 1898.
“It was a much wilder place back then,” Lanier said, “and it’s still pretty doggone wild.”
Florida’s first major beekeeping operation was established in 1872 near Daytona and its second in Wewahitchka by S.S. Alderman. But living along the Apalachicola River was not easy. A 1943 pamphlet about beekeeping from the Florida Department of Agriculture said, “The tupelo tree is the only lure to bring civilization to the banks of the Apalachicola.” Photos courtesy of the State Archives of Florida.
Northwest Florida is still the state’s least developed region, but in the late 1800s, there were few roads, and the forests were so dense that tupelo trees were accessible only by boat. As late as 1943, a pamphlet about beekeeping from the Florida Department of Agriculture described the region as a no-man’s-land.
“The tupelo tree,” the pamphlet said, “is the only lure to bring civilization to the banks of the Apalachicola.”
Beekeepers built floating docks, called bee barges, in the swamps to get their hives close to the trees. The barges, with platforms 20 to 30 feet above ground, were high enough to avoid flooding and low enough that the tupelo blooms could hover over the hives.
For decades, bee barges were the only way to make tupelo honey. Although you can still see roughly a dozen bee barges along the river, more roads and riverfront properties allow beekeepers to place their hives on land near the trees for easier access and transport.
Jeff Pippin, the state apiary inspector for Gulf County, said that even though tupelo honey is fickle and difficult to gather, he doesn’t expect a decline in interest from beekeepers or buyers.
“Beekeepers are as tenacious as their bees,” he said.
If I could use only one word to describe Gary, it would be tenacious.
Each wooden box has 10 frames inside. The rectangular spruce wood frames have a honeycomb interior, and each cell is a storage unit that bees fill with the nectar they’ve collected.
After checking on the bees in the yard, Gary invited me to join him for lunch with Brodie at the honey house. We sat on the front porch and talked as we ate fried chicken and tater logs from the grocery store deli.
Bees buzzed by my eyelashes, and a green spider smaller than my pinky nail lowered itself on a silk thread in front of my nose. I pinched the thread with my thumb and forefinger to set him on the ground. In this peaceful setting, Gary told me how nature helped him escape the lowest point of his life.
After the bank took his house and cars following the housing-market collapse, Gary, who was 45 and single at the time, moved onto a houseboat he owned. He survived on $50 or $60 a month to pay his light bill and did odd jobs to earn money. When the reality of what had happened sank in, he needed to decide what to do next.
“First thing I did was get a little angry,” he said. “Then I took a long, hard look at the man in the mirror. There were a lot of things about that man that I wasn’t happy with. How can I fix that?”
To find out, he decided he’d turn to God by volunteering at church and connect with nature through beekeeping. He couldn’t afford to buy his first bees, so he offered to remove ones that regularly build their hives in the crevices of peoples’ homes. Instead of an exterminator’s coming to remove them, Gary gave them a new purpose.
To get hives, he refurbished old boxes that were offered to him by a former beekeeper.
By 2015, he had enough supplies to harvest his first crop.
His daughter, Jenny, got a loan to buy more bees while Gary repaired two 50-year-old honey extractors and built more boxes, pallets, and equipment.
As the economy picked up and he got more work building houses, he knew he needed help growing the business and managing finances. At the same time, Miss Pam, whom Gary met in his 20s when she was his kids’ guidance counselor at school, was looking for a career change. She saw his posts on Facebook and remembers thinking that she wanted to learn about bees.
“I was going to go home and message him,” she said, “and he messaged me later that day. That’s not coincidence.”
Gary noticed that she was “liking” his Facebook posts about bees and messaged her to ask if she’d be interested in helping him. She was, and things went so well that they were married in 2017. Now she manages their honey and home-building businesses. They had a surge in rebuilding demand after Hurricane Michael, and they plan to invest some of those earnings to achieve Gary’s dream of having 1,000 hives.
They have a long way to go, but Gary’s daughter, Jenny, doesn’t doubt that they will get there.
“Dad doesn't ever say something without doing it,” she said. “So when he says we’ll have 1,000 hives of bees, I'm sure we're going to have 1,000 hives of bees one day.”
For now, they’re grateful to have brought approximately 1,000 bottles of honey to the 2021 Tupelo Honey Festival. At Lake Alice’s waterfront park, honey purveyors and vendors selling boutique clothing, home goods, and local arts and crafts set up booths under the Spanish moss.
Tupelo trees bloom for only two to three weeks each year starting in mid- to late April, so bees have a short window to gather nectar to make sweet, sticky gold.
This was the first festival since 2019 due to the pandemic, and the excitement was palpable. I smiled as I listened to the band play the national anthem on saxophone and watched high school athletes giggle as they asked passersby for donations. Mostly, I felt a sense of relief for the beekeepers as visitors buzzed from booth to booth to taste and decide which honey they would buy.
Miss Pam sat at their booth ready to sell honey, wearing gold honey bee earrings the size of my thumb and a tie-dyed shirt that read “Go with the flow” in yellow script. She said being there after rebuilding from the hurricane and living through the pandemic felt like a sign that maybe things are getting back to normal.
One person asked to take a picture of her earrings — Miss Pam laughed and turned her head so they could — and another encouraged his mom to have a sample. He told his mom tupelo is a region, so each beekeeper’s honey tastes a little different. Miss Pam handed her a spoonful and politely explained that, when it comes to honey, tupelo is not a place but a tree.
And to Gulf County beekeepers, it’s much more than that.
“I think it’s one of God’s ways of letting us know we’re not in control,” Miss Pam said. “That’s what tupelo is.”
Jessica Bradley Wells is a freelance writer in North Carolina interested in telling stories about nature and the problem solvers who protect it. She lives in Charlotte but grew up in the small town of Two Egg, Florida, and calls the Panhandle home. For The Bitter Southerner, she has written about a burn crew working to return a natural balance to the affected habitat and an art studio powered by excess methane from a retired landfill.
Aileen Perilla is a freelance photojournalist based in Tallahassee, Florida. She served as a video/photo intern at the Orlando Sentinel, and after graduating from the University of Central Florida, she was selected to participate in The New York Times Student Journalism Institute. She is currently working as a photo editor at The New York Times News Service.
