Is your honey completely natural?

Yes. Once the beekeeper has taken the frames filled with honey from the hive the wax cappings are sliced off to expose the honeycomb and glistening honey underneath. These uncapped frames are put inside an extractor that works like a big salad spinner, with the honey flying out, as the beekeeper turns the handle. The honey is spun out and collects at the bottom of the extractor. It’s then run through a sieve like the sort you have in your kitchen for flour, and then straight into storage buckets. It’s these buckets that we go around the country collecting from the beekeepers. Each one full of raw honey, just as the bees made it!

We keep the honey in these buckets until it’s time to jar it. Then, if it’s crystalised, we’ll warm it gently over the course of a few days to bring it back to its runny state so we can jar it. We make sure that the honey is warmed at 35-40 degrees which reflects the temperature inside a beehive, whatever the weather outside!

We jar it, label it with the beekeeper and hives it came from, and how many jars of the honey were produced – never many, so you’re always lucky to have some!

That’s it, really no human intervention so all our honeys are British, raw and totally natural, unaltered by humans and just as the bees made them.

Why is some honey runny?

One of the ways honey changes is by crystalising. This is a normal process and a sign of the honey’s purity as the glucose in honey starts to knit together around the pollen grains in the honey. The glucose content in a honey will depend on the flowers the bees have visited to make it - if they’ve been visiting the bright yellow oil seed rape fields it will crystalise very quickly, almost within days.

Glucose needs pollen grains to knit around and crystalise so supermarket honeys have been pressure filtered to take as much pollen out as possible, and then pasteurised to kill the yeasts and enzyme activity to keep the honey runny and stable for as long as possible. But we love how honey changes over time and embrace every honey’s unique character which is why we simply jar it and leave it and let you enjoy it in all its natural glory!

If your honey has already crystalised in the jar and you want to pour it then gentle warming will bring it back to runny, either by stirring it in to your porridge, spreading it on your hot toast, or by sitting it by warm radiators, or even on a very low microwave setting will do it.

But the most important thing to remember is that every honey will eventually crystalise and in different ways depending on the combination of flowers that made it. It most certainly hasn’t gone off and will still be good.

This is why you can't order runny or set honey from us - we let it do it's natural thing so it might be runny or on its way to crystallising depending on the nectars in it.  That's all part of the fun of raw honey!!