During the first week in August we moved 30 hives up to the heather moors in our normal spot and after a shocking summer of awful weather we’ve been so happy to see some honey being produced, a real saving grace for our season and excitingly it mean our new Cut comb and Chunk are now back in stock.
The move generally went well, starting at 4am on a cool August morning, all the hives were loaded up and a net thrown over the trailer, we strapped the hives down well and set off on our hour and a half journey north. As soon as we arrived we sprung to action and within 20 minutes the hives were sat on their pallets and their lids has been replaced. They weren’t in a great mood so there was a few stings had but Misha and Myself but that’s just an occupational hazard!
Our 2023 SALSA Audit
Our SALSA audit was actually in July but we’ve kept it quiet until our certificate was finally released! I’m very proud to say that we have again passed this rigorous food safety certification.
It started at 9am with our auditor arrived on site and we started to go through how the day would progress.
We had our first hour checking through our HACCP (basically a large risk assessment of our processing and facility)
Then we went up to our honey room and our auditor looked around our facility before having an hour watching us jar honey and extract honey. This part makes me nervous but we stick to how our paperwork says we process and deal with any issues how we are supposed to and all is fine!
After that we went through a section called prerequisites this is the bulk of the audit and covers all our policies, procedures and records for everything from cleaning, to allergens and of course traceability which is a massive part of a good food safety system.
I’m glad to say we passed with only a few minor improvements before next year. We did have one action which was to have our scale calibration weights re-calibrated which needed to be done within a month. So a month on and we have our certificate, a lot of hard behind the scenes work but well worth it for us!
This month also saw the completion of our baseline audit for DASH a disease accreditation run by DEFRA which trains beekeepers to manage their own disease and standstill notices. We had the training back in May as many will remember but we have been waiting on our audit to be completed until we were happy to say we had passed our DASH course.
Ben and Guy came out from the National Bee Unit to complete our last few hives that hadn’t already been checked earlier in the year.
A great success which will lead to less frequent checks by the NBU on our bees, I’m always happy for time saved!
Next month we will chat about a super exciting new bit of equipment we have arriving in the next few days which is going to completely revolutionise our production. Also we will give you an update on our summer crop or at least what little there is of it!
We have decided not to continue with Market Bosworth Farmers Market, it has been a tricky market recently and although it is a market we love to be part of it isn’t really economically viable anymore for us.
We are at Planters Open Air Country Fair over the first weekend and at Huddlesford Heritage Gathering on the 23 and 24th September
Thank you for all of your support
Matthew