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Honey Summer Harvest – Life on The Farm

The Summer Harvest is underway...

Welcome to our Honey Summer Harvest ‘Life on The Farm’. The summer harvest season is bustling, and it’s the perfect time to enjoy our finest honey yield of the year, aptly named ‘Summer Honey’. At the end of June, we meticulously gathered fresh combs directly from the hive, and we must say, the flavour profile of this batch surpasses expectations! The texture is luxuriously smooth, and the aroma is nothing short of enchanting, creating an unforgettable sensory delight. With this exquisite British honey in hand, you might be curious about our extraction process. Understanding the origins and processing of your food is crucial—it embodies the true spirit of local produce. Let us guide you through our meticulous extraction process, from farm to jar!

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‘Uncapping’. The beeswax seal on the honeycomb must be cut away. Use tools like an uncapping knife or roller for this task.

‘Extraction’. Place the uncapped frames in a honey extractor, which spins to pull honey out using centrifugal force. Adjust speed and time based on the honey’s thickness. 

British honey, Honey, Natural honey, raw honey, uk honey, unpasteurised honey, Holt Hall Apiary, Tamworth, Summer Runny Honey, Staffordshire, Farm, British Farm

‘Filtration’. The honey is filtered to eliminate wax bits and bee remnants. Use a filter with the right micron size for pristine honey.

‘Settling’. Allow the honey to rest, letting air bubbles and impurities float to the surface. This takes approximately 1-2 days. 

British honey, Honey, Natural honey, raw honey, uk honey, unpasteurised honey, Holt Hall Apiary, Tamworth, Summer Runny Honey, Staffordshire, Farm, British Farm

‘Jarring’. Once settled, pour the honey into jars. Delicious! 

We pride ourselves in jarring our produce to the highest standard, adhering to strenuous health and safety regulations.  This is a snapshot of what we can do, we have an even bigger honey room next door!

How are we enjoying our honey harvest?

We are loving gooey overnight oats topped with juicy raspberries & strawberries! Our golden 100% British natural Summer Honey is the perfect companion for a refreshing morning breakfast during warmer months. Cold oats provide a delightful and nutritious start to your day, brimming with essential nutrients. Our secret? Sourcing high-quality local ingredients. Our rich honey pairs beautifully with dark chocolate and fresh fruits, enhancing the flavour profile. We recommend Manor Farm Fruits for their exceptionally sweet and succulent produce! 🍓

Meet our baby cows!

Yes, you heard us right! We aren’t just all about the bees, we are a family run farm with all sorts of animals living with us. Meet our baby cows. These young bovines are incredibly sociable and affectionate, akin to the experience of being licked by a playful kitten 🐈 

These charming animals bring joy to our daily lives with their curious antics and playful nature, constantly engaging in delightful mischief. This summer has blessed us with an abundant honey harvest, and the farm is as vibrant and lively as ever, bustling with the energy of growth and activity. Life on the farm is a whirlwind of tasks, from caring for these wonderful creatures to tending to our crops and managing our bee hives! Stay tuned for more updates and stories about our charming baby cows and their adventures on the farm! 🚜

It's Sandwich Friday!

Our family tradition here on the farm brings everyone together for a delightful lunch every Friday. Grandpa makes his weekly trip to the local store to gather sandwiches for the gang. With multiple generations living on the farm, our family lunch time is a bustling, busy-bee occasion. This year, even our dedicated staff has embraced this tradition, sharing in the camaraderie. Our staff presented a delectable Summer Honey & Smoked Salmon Sourdough sandwich, elevated with a sprinkle of black pepper and a splash of lemon.🍋🍯

With thanks to ASDA store for their ‘Exceptional Mild & Delicate Scottish Smoked Salmon’ making this sandwich Friday extra indulgent. These flavours combine to create a symphony of taste that’s simply irresistible. Would you add local honey to your sandwich?? 

Sandwich recipe:

  • ASDA store for their ‘Exceptional Mild & Delicate Scottish Smoked Salmon’
  • Sourdough bread, (we used a vintage cheddar flavour)
  • Salt & black Pepper
  • A squirt of lemon
  • Baby leaf salad
  • a drizzling of Holt Hall’s Summer Honey 

Thanks for reading!

You can follow along with our farm life journey via our social media channels here, we are on Instagram & Facebook! Drop us a follow to keep up to date 

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June Sunrise & Hive checks…

We’ve been incredibly busy-ee, buzzing around the farm over the last few months. With the warm weather in full swing, this period marks the peak season for harvesting our exquisite honey. Spring rewarded us with an abundant harvest, and we experienced a brief June gap, which provided us a well-deserved pause to gear up for some exciting transformations at the farm. During this time, we revamped our website to reflect our new branding. We aimed for a light and refreshing aesthetic to beautifully showcase our delightful light honey. After much effort, our makeover is complete! We invite you to explore our online store and enjoy our elegant new website. Take a moment to browse and see if something catches your eye!

British honey, Honey, Natural honey, raw honey, uk honey, unpasteurised honey, Holt Hall Apiary, Tamworth, Summer Runny Honey 1kg, Staffordshire

We’ve been incredibly busy-ee, buzzing around the farm over the last few months. With the warm weather in full swing, this period marks the peak season for harvesting our exquisite honey. Spring rewarded us with an abundant harvest, and we experienced a brief June gap, which provided us a well-deserved pause to gear up for some exciting transformations at the farm. During this time, we revamped our website to reflect our new branding. We aimed for a light and refreshing aesthetic to beautifully showcase our delightful light honey. After much effort, our makeover is complete! We invite you to explore our online store and enjoy our elegant new website. Take a moment to browse and see if something catches your eye!

Next onto the farm, we have welcomed Suzannah to our team. Suzannah, a landscape and nature photographer, has joined us to enhance our website and manage our social media channels. Her mission is to beautifully showcase the exquisite honey we produce and tell the captivating story of our family-run farm. We want people to connect with the origins of their honey and understand the unique narrative of our farm, complete with all the quirks that accompany family farm life.

Suzannah shares our passion for honey and is a fervent supporter of local produce as well as health and wellbeing. Her love for nature and photography aligns perfectly with our vision. We are thrilled to see how she brings our story to life, highlighting the values and dedication that drive us. Suzannah will craft engaging content that not only highlights our products but also the essence of our farm’s traditions and the joy of working together as a family.

Meet our delightful duo, Alice and Abbey, the charming sister donkeys of our farm! These affectionate creatures are neighbours to our buzzing bees, and their soothing brays bring a touch of nostalgia to our daily farm life. Known for their gentle and loving nature, Alice and Abbey are a favourite among visitors, but gaining their trust requires patience and a pocket full of ginger biscuits. They are most vocal in the morning when they kindly let us know they are ready for breakfast! Interesting fact: Donkeys are known for their intelligence and strong sense of loyalty, making them wonderful companions on the farm. Their presence not only enriches the farm experience but also brings joy to everyone around.

Our farm bees are buzzing with activity, diligently gathering nectar from the vibrant summer blooms to make our 100% natural British summer honey. Their numbers are increasing as we’ve successfully made new nucleus hives and transitioned some into a full hives. Establishing a new hive is manageable and rewarding, especially when seeing frames brimming with nectar, eggs, and young larvae. These tiny larvae will evolve into industrious workers as summer progresses! There’s ample honeycomb available for the bees to expand into their new abode. Bees naturally tend to move upwards, so once this hive has filled up, we’ll introduce supers to grant them more room to flourish during the warm summer months.

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March Madness!

A very exciting month has just passed and spring is well and truly underway! The reason I didn’t blog last month is that I’d snuck away on holiday before the madness of our spring and summer got underway! 

Since I’ve been back we’ve been busy jarring to keep up with spring demand, not only of our own delicious honey but also for some of our packing customers too. 

We had a really exciting visit just last week with the BBC (maybe it should be BEE BEE C) on the farm filming our hives and interviewing me about honey adulteration and why cheap fake honey often sold in supermarkets impacts real beekeepers. 

Back with the bees themselves and one of the most important jobs in March is checking on the colonies after the winter months. We carefully inspect the hives, ensuring the queens are active and that each colony has enough food to sustain them until nectar flows become more reliable. Thanks to the mild weather, our bees have been more active than usual, venturing out to collect early pollen from snowdrops, crocuses, and willow trees. 

We’ve been really happy to see their growth and they look in great shape for the season to come. The other benefit of the drier spring is I’ve not gotten my pickup stuck in any fields yet!

Over the next few weeks we will be feeding any colonies that need it to spur them on and start making sure we have an even amount of brood (baby bees) in each hive so that they develop at much the same speed which makes our management much easier for the rest of the season!

British honey, Honey, Natural honey, raw honey, uk honey, unpasteurised honey, Holt Hall Apiary, Tamworth, Ginger Infused Honey 227g

Honey Lemon Drizzle Cake

Ingredients:

  • 175g unsalted butter, softened

  • 150g runny honey

  • 100g caster sugar

  • 3 large eggs

  • 225g self-raising flour

  • Zest of 1 lemon

  • 2 tbsp milk

For the drizzle:

 

  • Juice of 1 lemon

  • 2 tbsp honey

Method:

  1. Preheat your oven to 170°C (fan) and grease a loaf tin.

  2. Beat the butter, honey, and sugar until pale and fluffy.

  3. Add the eggs one at a time, mixing well.

  4. Fold in the flour, lemon zest, and milk until combined.

  5. Pour into the tin and bake for 40-45 minutes until golden and a skewer comes out clean.

  6. Mix the lemon juice and honey, then drizzle over the warm cake.

  7. Let it soak in before slicing and enjoying!

Thank you for reading our short blog, if you want to know anything about what we get up to please do email us on info@holthallapiary.co.uk and I would be happy to answer it here!

Have a great month!

Matthew Ingram
Holt Hall Apiary

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January, our busy quietest month!

Well Christmas seems a long time ago now! It’s been a busy month considering its January which is normally a quieter month on the bee farm. We’ve had the builders in and knocked a couple of walls down allowing us access in to a much larger space that is our new warehouse. In total once fully racked we are hoping to be able to fit over 200 pallets in there! The main issue up to now has been the lack of space so it’s feeling a bit strange that we suddenly don’t need to worry about it. 

As part of the warehouse we have built a new honey warmer that will be able to warm about 6 tons of honey at a time, our current honey warmers along with most standard honey warmers have heaters at the top but the issue is the top of the honey drums heat up but the bottom of the drums don’t, this one has ducting in the floor to pump hot air under the pallets and hopefully speed up warming and use less power too. It’s not operational yet but I can’t wait until it is! 

The honey packing side of the business remains busy and I’m proud to say in 2024 we filled a record 247,000 jars! A number I just couldn’t have imagined a couple of years ago! They went out for lot’s of different brands into retailers all around the UK and even abroad to places like Spain, America and Saudi Arabia. 

Out with the bees we’ve been busy treating them for Varroa. Varroa is an invasive mite that lives on honeybees. We trickle a mixture of sugar syrup and Oxalic acid over the bees during the winter. The bees consume the mixture without any issues but it burns the mite which helps keep our bees in peak condition for the spring. When we go around we also add fondant which is sugar to help any hives that look a little short on food. 

In mild weather the bees are more active and so eat more food. Over the next few weeks we will go back around and check if they have eaten their fondant and if we need to top it up again. 

One of the other jobs we’ve done this month is planning this coming season. We’ve decided to stick with hive numbers around 150. That seems to be a good amount for us to produce enough honey for our own sales. We’ve decided to make up some splits (small hives) early in the year, through May and June and then recombine some later in the season to make sure they’re really strong ready for the summer honey flow.  

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Thank you so much for reading our blog, your support as always really helps our small business as we try and build our own honey sales!

Matthew Ingram
Holt Hall Apiary

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Hap-bee New Year!

Happy New Year! What a year 2024 was! It seems to have absolutely flown by. This time last year we were just starting our biggest ever order of 100,000 1oz jars not knowing quite how we would do it, in the end it was all fine and we learnt a lot from it! 

Throughout this year we’ve been busy growing and re-investing in the business which means that as I sit here writing this today we have filled over 3x the amount of jars as we did in 2023 . We’ve got big plans for this year too with lots of new developments and a massive 200 pallet warehouse being converted from one of the old farm building as we speak! 

The order fulfilment side of the business also came in to its own this year with Shara who works in our mini warehouse sending over 200 parcels in one day during the run up to Christmas for all of the different brands we work with.

Aside from all of the other brands we work with our Holt Hall Apiary brand has undergone a refresh which seems to have gone down well so far! During 2025 we really want to bring some of the focus back to our own brand which I think is unique in the fact we are actually beekeepers not just some large brand buying and selling honey with now actual connection to the bees! 

During this year we also continued our hugely popular beekeeping experiences and did a couple of beginner beekeeping days too. 

For those who haven’t come across them before we offer hands on beekeeping experiences for those who just have an interest in bees. You don’t need any experience or kit you just book your slot and we have about 45 minutes chatting about the bees and the ‘theory’ side of beekeeping before we get you suited up and head out beekeeping, where you really do the beekeeping yourself (with a little guidance).

The full day course is much more in-depth, the morning is spent going over the theory of beekeeping along with all of the equipment you need and what you’ll be looking for at certain times of the year. Then after a light lunch we head out for a couple of hours of beekeeping where you’ll get to go through lots of hives and learn loads!!

Finally I just want to say thank you to all of you, our customers and supporters. I’m now going into my 8th year as a beekeeper and it’s amazing to see how quickly we have grown over the past few years. That couldn’t be done without all of you, sharing our social media post, recommending us to friends and family and of course enjoying our honey. 

I hope you all have a wonderful 2025 and keep up with us throughout 


Matthew Ingram
Holt Hall Apiary

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There’s a chill in the air!

Well I didn’t quite forget to write the blog… But I am writing it on the morning it gets published! After opening the door to trick or treaters every couple of minutes last night it may have escaped my mind! 

Over the last month and going forward for the next few days we’ve been getting our bees ready for winter. Any hives that hadn’t produced enough to get themselves through winter have been fed syrup to bulk them up ready for the long winter. It’s due to cool off now over the coming week or two and that means the end of syrup feeding as it becomes too cold for the bees to consume it, that means one of the final beekeeping jobs of the year is nearly upon us. Over the next week we will be going around removing the feeders and adding something called a mouse guard, a metal plate with holes that the bees can get through but that stops mice getting in. We will also tidy up our apiaries removing any empty hives and changing over any damaged lids that might let water in. Once that’s done we won’t be doing much with them until January time. 

One thing we’ve been very happy about this autumn is the lack of wasps, normally they cause our bees some real problems because they fight their way in to the hives to eat the honey the bees have collected. This year however they just haven’t really got going which has been brilliant for our bees!

Over the winter we are busy jarring honey, over the past 18 months our business has changed quite a bit and we are now jarring honey for a large number of other brands which keeps us very busy. I think since January we have filled about 200,000 jars!!! A long way from my first 9 jars done in the kitchen when I started 7 years ago! We help these other brands with all things honey, from finding specific ones from other British bee farmers to helping with label design and printing. We all still enjoy getting suited up and checking on our bees though! 

 

Sorry this month is only a short update, we’ve got some expansion plans over the coming months so hopefully we can update you all with that in December and January.

Thank you very much for reading our blog and supporting our small business
Matthew Ingram

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Harvest 2024 over and out!

Well September has flown by! We’ve been busy getting our bees back down off the moors and sorting out our cut comb. 

Due to Heather beetle damage we’ve really struggled to produce as much Heather honey as we have done in previous years. The picture below (or right) is the trailer returning from the moors. At about 4am I headed up the M1 to our site near Sheffield. I had already strapped the hives so when I arrived I closed up the hives and loaded them on to the trailer. We can easily stack 30 hives on the trailer which is an ideal amount. I now always put a net over the trailer just in case there are any issues. 

I was back down from the moors with the bees and unloaded by 8:30am which was great. I must admit to having a slightly earlier finish that day as it’s always a tiring, but rewarding job.

Back with the bees that didn’t go up to the moors, all of them have been treated for Varroa Mite which is an invasive mite species that live on honey bees. We’ve been seeing quite a bit of varroa damage in our hives over the past month so we were please to get treatments on. 

We’ve also started feeding bees, the ones not strong enough to get through winter. They have a strong sugar syrup and will need a total of about 25kg of food to get through winter. 

Over the next few weeks we will continue feeding once a week and then we will go around and take the feeders off before the end of October.

I’m really excited to say our new branding is slowly being rolled out with cut comb having the new labels. Over the next month hopefully we will roll out a few more. I think the new branding really shows that we are a genuine producer that cares about our bees and of course how delicious our honey is!

Summer 2024 has been a great crop for us which is a massive relief after an awful spring. If you’re buying our runny honey it will be this seasons which is a fantastic light golden honey and probably one of my favourites for the past few years. The changing taste of honey because of what that season’s flowers and weather have provided is truly special. 

Thank you very much for reading our blog once again. Your support is so much appreciated 

Matthew Ingram
Holt Hall Apiary

 

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Summer Honey Harvesting

…and just like that summer is nearly over! Extraction is well underway and very nearly finished. 

The harvesting process has remained largely unchanged for a very long time. My Grandpa can remember his Grandpa spinning honey in the garage to the farmhouse. Now our equipment is much larger but the process is the same.

First we go out and put clearing boards on the hives, they’re kind of line one way valves, the bees leave the supers and can’t get back in. The next day we go and collect the supers which are stacked on pallets. 

When we get back we forklift them in to the honey room and begin extracting. The part of the process is to remove the wax cappings. Historically that was done with a knife but due to the number of frames we have we now have a machine that has serrated knives that go back and forth as the frame is pushed between them. 

Next the uncapped frame goes in to the extractor where it spins for about 8 minutes sometimes more and times less depending on the consistency of the honey. 

The honey drains out and it goes into a tank where it settles overnight to allow the beeswax to float up and mean only a small amount of straining is required to make it ready for jarring. 

The wax from the cappings goes through a press to make sure any remaining honey is collected and the wax is rendered down and traded in for something called foundation which is used to fill our new frames. 

We’ve been busy jarring honey as well as extracting it this month. Since our expansion back in May we have two separate rooms for extraction and bottling as extraction makes such a mess with beeswax everywhere!

Since January we have bottled over 40 ton of honey which is considerably more than last year and a real sign of our small business growing. We have already got plans for our next phase of expansion due to happen in early Jan 2025 with a new warehouse area being renovated to allow us to store hopefully upward of 200 pallets. Storage has become the largest bottle neck as we’ve taken on more and more own label customers that all have their own bottles, honey, labels etc and we need somewhere to store the.

I’m really happy to say that our brand has had a bit of change which you’ll have already noticed. We decided that our brand hadn’t had anything done to it for years and maybe it was time we started to do a bit more with it. I’m really happy to say our online sales have gone well so I want to thank you all for that.

Our 3 jar pack still remains our best seller along with the 1KG jars of our delicious runny honey. Our Runny honey 227g is already the new season honey and the 1kg will be moving to new season honey in about 2 weeks.

Thank you so much for reading our blog, your support is so much appreciated. As a small business your support sharing our social media content and buying our honey online or through our fantastic stockists. 
This Saturday the 7th we are at Planters Garden Centre for the Open Air Country Fair please do come along and support lots of great small businesses

Thank you
Matthew Ingram
Holt Hall Apiary

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Finally some sunshine

Well what a difference a month makes! This time a few weeks ago most bee farmers around the UK were worrying that the weather was never going to pick up and it was going to be one of the worst summer harvests in a long time. The continual rain and cold was making everything behind, you can really see that with other insect life. There hasn’t been many butterflies, bumble bees or even wasps (we’re glad about that one!) yet this year which really shows the impact of the terrible spring. 

Anyhow… the sun is shining now and the bees have produced what looks to be a reasonable crop of honey in the past couple of weeks but only time will tell really! 

Just this morning (31st July) I took my first drive up to the Heather moors to assess how far off flowering they are and get the site (called a heather stance traditionally) sorted. 

I was pleased to find the heather just in bud but not yet open, the photo above or left is of the most forward section. Our bees will be moved in the early hours of Monday morning before the they are out flying. Hopefully they will be super productive as Cut Comb is one of our best sellers and currently out of stock. I’ve got my fingers crossed!

Back in the honey room its been a busy month preparing for our annual SALSA audit which always comes at our busiest time. I’m very happy to say all of our prep paid off and we had everything ready for a very successful audit resulting in just one minor action point and no improvements which is our best audit thus far. 

Sticking with auditing today we have also had a visit by the soil association to do an Organic Audit as one of our packing customers purchases organic honey from Spain.

I must say when I started with a few hives 7 years ago I didn’t expect it to turn in to my job let alone in to a growing business processing honey from all around the World. 

I should also mention that to keep up with demand Shara has recently joined us to help with order packing and Doug started just this week to help with the processing side of the business. A very exciting time indeed!!

Many of you will have noticed we are doing far fewer markets than before. Unfortunatley we are struggling to make them work along side a busy Monday – Friday of beekeeping and processing and beekeeping experience every couple of weekends. 

I’m very lucky that my Mum, Christine who most of you will know has been out at a couple of events and we will be out this weekend at Staunton Harold Artisan Market which was a great event last year with some very high quality traders. If you are around it’s well worth a visit if for nothing else but a beautiful setting. 

You can of course always buy online or though many of great stockists which can all be found – HERE

Thank you all for reading, next time i’ll make sure we have plenty of photos of the bees on the Heather as that is always beautiful. If you ever have any beekeeping questions then drop me an email at info@holthallapiary.co.uk and I will make sure it’s answered in our blog!

Thank you
Matthew Ingram

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July Already!

Well… Firstly I need to apologise, where did the June 1st blog go… well I totally forgot! I’ve been writing this blog for at least the past 5 years and I’ve never totally missed a month, I’ve been late once or twice but never totally missed a month. So, sorry about that! 

Any how on to our month. For at least the first half of the month things were looking awful. Beekeepers often talk about a June gap where the spring flowers have gone over and the summer flowers aren’t ready yet. Well this year because of the awful wet weather it seemed like the June gap would never end. We even had to feed our bees to keep them alive which isn’t something we normally need to do in June. 

Tides turned around the 3rd week in June though with the hot weather starting and the bees were pouring nectar in! Hives that had been close to starving if they weren’t being managed were full to bursting within a few days and we then had to rush around putting supers on. 

Although it’s gone a bit cooler now the bees are still working well and bringing in more honey than they up until now. 

The warm weather coincided with our second beginners course of the year which was a great success, but very warm in the suits. Luckily we had air conditioning in the class room which just about managed to keep it cool enough.

You can tell I’m happy with the honey that’s come in from the photo (right or below) with my cheesy grin!

The site above/ left is one of our favourite sites. It has done well for the past two years and as you can tell from how stacked up the boxes are it’s still doing well now! 

We’ve also been busy making more hives to make sure we have plenty for producing honey next year as well because demand for our honey is certainly on the rise, Thank you!

Our most popular honey online is the 1kg jar which for the first time ever we had to put out of stock while we caught up with jarring. They’re back in stock now though!

For those of you with beekeeping experience vouchers, now’s the time to book on. We have good availability in August so find your timeslot now – here 

Over the next month we will be busy jarring honey as we always are and getting our bees ready for the move to the heather in early August. It’s always something I look forward to even with the extra work getting the hives up to the peak district! I really can’t believe how quickly this year is going!

 

Thank you as always for reading and supporting!

Matthew Ingram
Holt Hall Apiary