How is your honey different to what we buy in the supermarket?

Callum: ‘Raw’ honey is simply 100% pure honey, with no flavourings or syrups added. Unprocessed honey is honey that has not been pasteurised. Pasteurisation can destroy the honey’s natural properties.

Unfortunately, a lot of supermarket honey is a mix of several different kinds of honey and is known to be ‘bulked’ out with cheaper alternatives such as rice and corn syrup. They often overheat their honey too, killing off all the antioxidants, nutrients, and enzymes. Their honey is cheap but at the cost of cutting a lot of corners. Our honey is spun out of the comb, filtered once to take out any debris and poured straight into the jar ready to go. No heating, nothing added, with all the nutrients, minerals and natural flavours preserved just as the bees make it.

Why do you move your bees around and does this affect the taste and type of honey?

Mark: One of our mottos is ‘following the flower’. Trees and plants come into flower at different times during the year and farmers plant different crops in their fields from year to year. To pollinate and make honey from food crops such as rape, beans and apples. Our bees are packed up early in the morning and transported to a new destination just as the crop is about to flower. When the bees wake up, they are in a new location with masses of flowers to fly to. Each time we move the bees we give them the opportunity to collect nectar from different plants and this is why the honey always tastes slightly different, but always delightful.

What’s the most fulfilling part of a beekeeper’s job?

Callum: Nurturing a weak colony back to full strength is always very rewarding. It takes time and patience but once you see them going crazy in the summer sun bringing in pollen it’s great to see. The most consistently fulfilling part must be the opportunity we have to work within nature almost every day, especially in the summer months. I see a lot of wildlife going about their business wherever I go, I’m not much of a hippie, but you can learn a lot from taking a moment to just watch nature do its thing, whether it’s beautiful or cruel.

Talk to us about some of the guest honey suppliers you work with.

Heather: We work with like-minded beekeepers across the world. Some of these family-run businesses are amazingly similar to how we operate. During the season we are always in communication with each other about how the bees are, what the weather is like and asking for samples of the new harvest.

It is very important to us and our customers to know that the bees are looked after and that the honey is pure. One such supplier and friend is Adolfo (as seen in the corresponding image). He runs a family business, located in Aragon, Spain, that has been in operation for generations. They take their bees to the foot of Mount Moncayo in the vast forests of the National Park to produce blackberry honey. Quickly becoming a firm favourite with all our customers. Some of the other friends and suppliers are Hana from Czech, Andrei from Transylvania, Emil from Bulgaria and Nikos from Greece.