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Fair Franklin Square beekeeper sells homemade honey
When John Sperduto bought some honey for Christmas four years ago, he became interested in how the sugary, sweet substance is made, and started to watch YouTube videos about the process every day and night.
“I became obsessed,” Sperduto, 42, recounted.
He joined the Long Island Beekeepers Club shortly thereafter, bought all of the equipment he would need to start beekeeping at his Franklin Square home, and picked up his first colony in May 2018. Now, he has four colonies that he collects honey from, and is selling bottles of it for the holiday season.
“It tastes so different from what you get in the store,” Sperduto said of his product. “It’s so unique in flavor, but best of all, it can’t get more local than the bees gathering nectar and pollen in your backyard.”
Sperduto collects the honey throughout the summer by taking the honey keeper frames from the hives, cutting the wax capping off with the help of his wife, Wendy, and putting the frames in a centrifuge spinner to extract the honey. Once all of the honey is collected from the frames, Sperduto empties the honey from the centrifuge into some bottles, while the wax is filtered out for Sperduto to make into candles, skin cream and lip balm.
He sold the lip balm in little gift bags with chocolate from Sea-Cliff based COCO Confections and Coffee last year, but this is the first year Sperduto is just selling bottles of his Johnny’s 24 Honey. Local sales have been going well, he said, with some customers reorder the honey two or three times.
“Franklin Square folks,” he said, “are loving the honey.”
Sperduto’s eight-ounce honey bottles are $9 and the 16-ounce bottles are $16, with free local delivery. To make a purchase, customers can contact him on Facebook or at @Johnnys24Honey on Instagram.
