Olney Honey

Swarm collection

It's that time of year when swarms of bees start arriving in gardens. If you have a swarm of bees, and would like me to give them a home, please let me know. Click here to read more...

Latest swarms collected from the Near Town Allotments and from a tree in Dickens Spinney.

Olney Honey - season summary

As the bees turn in for the Autumn it's time to review the year, and make plans for the year ahead. This year most of the hives were sited at the side of an oil-seed rape field, which produced plenty of hard-set white honey early in the year, but once the fields turned, they were struggling a bit for forage and the volume of honey reduced.

I now have a hive in the Cowper & Newton Museum garden, and it will be interesting to see how the honey from that compares: the garden is managed in a historical and eco-friendly way, so the bees should have a great time, and should have no need to venture far.

You'll also see that I have some honey from an out-apiary in Lavendon. This was set up late in the season, so volume this year was low, but I have high hopes for next year, as it is sited in a well established orchard, and should benefit both from that and the mix of fields and village gardens nearby.

Once the weather gets colder and the bees stop flying, I'll be able to move hives around between the various sites to balance the production. Feedback from the Food Festival (see below) was that I probably need to produce more runny honey than solid, which means more hives in village sites than beside oil-seed rape fields.

If you have a suitable spot in one of the villages near Olney, and would like me to site a hive or two there, let me know, I'm always on the look out for new sites. Read more about what makes a suitable site here.

Big Olney Food Festival

It was great to meet so many dedicated foodies at the Big Olney Food Festival. We sold lots of honey, and made many news friends. If you weren't able to make it this year, you should definately try to come along next year - apart from being a convenient time to stock up on your honey(!) and other delicacies, the festival has a wide range of stalls selling food and drink for consumption there and then, plus cookery demonstrations on stage and off, all accompanied by live music and activities for the kids. For more about the festival, see www.olneyonline.com/festival

Our hives

Our hives sit on the edge of a local field, facing south into the sun, with a stream behind them providing the bees with fresh running water. Trees overhead and a hedgerow behind provide some shelter from the worst of the weather.

The last few week have seen the bees respond magnificently to the blossoming flowers - both in the fields and in the Olney, Lavendon and Emberton gardens - and they have been making honey at a great rate.

Not all honey looks and tastes the same, and this is due mainly to the flowers the bees are foraging on. So over the course of the year the same bees can produce several distinct types of honey. Currently the main flowers the bees are on is the bright yellow oil-seed rape, and this produces a delicious soft-yet-solid honey, which is what we currently have in stock.

Our bees

Our bees are, as bees go, rather tame.  Sure, I prefer to keep my bee-suit on when working with them, but they aren't the aggressive in-your-face bees you sometimes find, that sting first and ask questions later. Whether this affects the taste of the honey is unknown, but it certainly makes my job easier!

The honey season

We harvest our honey several times a year from spring through autumn. There's no fixed timetable, as it's all down to nature, the weather, flowers and bees. Some honey can be left on the hives over the summer, and processed in bulk at the end of the season, whilst some honey will go solid in the comb if left, so has to be extracted early - honey from oil-seed rape flowers is a good example of this.

How we make our honey

Ok, sure, it's the bees that actually make the honey, but when they've done that it has to get into the jars, and they won't do that bit. The bees put the honey in 'supers' - wooden boxes full of frames, that sit at the top of each beehive.

When a super is full, we need to persuade the bees to move away from the super, so it can be carried away (otherwise you end up with a car full of bees, and you definately don't do that twice). The bees are kept out of the way using a board with a sort of one-way valve in it, which allows the bees to move down from the super into the rest of the hive, but not back up. Leaving that board in place overnight is usually long enough to get rid of most of the bees, and any stragglers can be lightly brushed off with a bee-brush or a feather.

Each super can contain up to 20 pounds of honey - which is why the most common beekeeping ailment isn't stings, but 'beekeepers' back'. It's also why a good apiary is one which you can drive right up to!

Once the supers, sans bees, are safely back to HQ, we need to extract the honey from them. Each super contains 10 frames, and they are placed in an 'extractor', basically a stainless steel barrel, where they are spun round. and as they spin round the honey flies out to the side of the extractor and collects at the bottom. Of course the standard sized super contains 10 frame, yet the standard extractor takes just 9 frames! - so we try to batch things together and do several supers in each session.

From there, the honey is run through a sieve-like filter to remove any fragments of wax, and left for a few hours so any bubbles can rise to the surface. Then it's poured into jars, and is ready for eating.

Organic honey

We're sometimes asked if our honey is organic.  Alas these days 'organic' has a very technical definition, and one of the requirements is that all (yes, all) the land the bees forage on must be organic too. Bees have quite a range however, so for a hive to be certified as organic it must be surrounded by 50 square miles of organic land. If there's a village or even a domestic garden in range that's not organic, then that's not enough to be official. As a result, it's virtually impossible to create organic honey in the UK.

Having said all that, our honey is a 'pure' food, in the sense that we add no preservatives, taste-enhancers or goodness knows what. Everything the honey needs to allow it to keep has been included by the bees.

Local honey as an allergy therapy

Some people claim that taking local honey can help as a therapy against allergies, on the basis that the honey contains local pollen, and the pollen causes the allergies. I'm not a medic, so can't comment on the effectiveness of this. It may be urban legend, or it may be a wonder cure. I just don't know. What I do know is that we only lightly filter our honey, so any pollen grains will slip through and remain in the honey. Talk to your doctor.

Sell-by dates

Whilst the EU require us to put a sell-by date on the labels, edible honey has been recovered from the Pyramids. Having said that, most people seem to empty the jar fairly swiftly anyway!