Food and nutrition experts have long touted the healing, nutritional and immune-system-boosting properties of local honey. Plus, honey offers a much more complex taste than simple refined white sugar. So many enjoy it as a sweetener for health and taste reasons, as well as the fact that it is native to the area and does not have to be imported. (Honey-producing bees are found practically all over the world, for that matter.)

One LaVergne-based company offers a variety of honeys from Tennessee farms and beyond.

The Lazy B Ranch stocks a selection of area honeys, along with other delicious products like jams, jellies, apple butter, maple syrup and more.

Honey’s taste and appearance can vary based on what flowers the bees visit to gather the nectar they use to make the golden goodness.

A bee can gather nectar from nearly any flowing plant, and some beekeepers make available a certain plant to control the flavor of honey. Clover is a popular one; surly you’ve seen a bee hovering over a small white puffy clover flower at some point. But some honey farmers may direct a particular colony of bees to a specific flower such as pumpkin, garlic, mint, sunflower or apple.

Wildflower, or polyfloral (meaning many flowers), honey comes from bees allowed to roam free and gather from whatever variety of flowers they can find.

Bruce Burgess of the Lazy B Ranch chats with a customer at the Nashville Flea Market

“Clover and wildflower are our two most popular honeys,” Bruce Burgess told a customer at his booth at the Nashville Flea Market.

But some of the delicious specialty honeys he offers include blueberry (yes, a sweet berry fruitiness comes through in the honey), and orange blossom, made from nectar his bees harvest from Florida orange groves.

Although Lazy B Ranch owner Bruce Burgess owns a multitude of bees, he doesn’t keep them on his modest-sized LaVergne property, rather he places them at different farms all over the region as plants are flowering.

“We may visit 300 farms in a year,” he says.

When he strikes a deal with a landowner to host his bees, he can pull a trailer full of bees to that location with flowers in bloom.

“A lot of our bees are on flatbeds; we just drop them off, then when the honey is ready, we’ll pick them up,” Burgess said.

He’ll also buy and sell honeys from other beekeepers, so his product line is forever changing.

“It’ll vary; I may have a beekeeper call and say he has so many gallons of raspberry, and I’ll sell that for a while,” he said.

Burgess won’t be at the Flea Market April 27-29; he will be hitting the National Cornbread Festival in South Pittsburgh, Tenn. (What could a cornbread festival need more than a big load of honey?! His products will surely be appreciated there.)

But he’ll be back in his usual spot in the Nashville Flea Market’s Agriculture Building May 24-26.

In the meantime, Martin’s Home & Garden (1020 N.W. Broad St.) and Murfreesboro Chiropractic Clinic (1535 W. Northfield Blvd.) offer Lazy B Ranch honey for sale.

For more information on honey and other products from the Lazy B Ranch, call (615) 604-1939.

Photos by Sarah Mayo