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RAIN RAIN GO AWAY!! – April 2024

Well March has flown by and been extremely busy as normal! We are all amazed how quickly the Oil seed rape has come out and because of the awful wet weather we have only managed one move so far. To get the 20 hives on to their new spring site involved getting bogged down 3 times and having to be towed. You can see from the photos just how wet it is on the fields. Unfortunately we’ve had to delay moving any more hives for a week or two in the hope it dries up.

Our other worry with the OSR being in flower so early is that it will go over while it’s too cold for the bees to make use of which would be a real shame. We use honey from Oil Seed Rape to make most of our infusions so we like plenty of it! 

While we are talking about other honeys I thought I would just mention our Borage honey. It’s an amazing honey that is incredibly light but with a very strong floral flavour. It isn’t a honey we can produce ourselves as we don’t have access to acres of Borage fields but when a bee farming friend, Neil, asked if we would like to try some I jumped at the chance to be able to offer this really special honey to our customers from a beekeeper who I know I can trust to provide a high quality honey that has been cared for as much as we care for our own honeys. 

We are seeing more an more people hearing about the (probable) adulteration of honeys in the supermarket and trying to find Raw honey as natural as possible. I just wanted to assure all of our customers that although we don’t label our honey as raw it is totally unpasteurised and has only been lightly warmed and passed through a sieve to remove any bits of beeswax.

The image in the header is of a cut out we did during the month. A farmer called us saying a tree had fallen down and could we come and save the bees which were exposed to the elements. We went along and got them in a hive. There’s a brief video of the process on our social media if you’re interested

Construction work has started yet again here at Holt Hall Apiary, we are busy making honey room number 3!

We’ve taken an old wall out and the levelling has been done ready to create a new room just a few metres from our current room. We have run out of space to extract our honey during the season because we’re so busy jarring honey all year around. I’m going to share photos of the whole process next month when hopefully it is nearly done! For now here’s two showing the lean-to and old brick wall being taken out and the new opening being levelled!

Thank you so much as ever for reading, it’s very exciting times here at HHA. Please do follow us on social media if you don’t already to see more regular updates. Also thank you for the continued orders both through us and our stockists. It really does mean a lot to me and our tiny team!

If you want to ready any of our older blogs you may have missed take a look below.

Thank you again
Matthew Ingram

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Spring is finally in the air!

We’ve had a great month getting back to normal. We’ve been busy jarring lots of honey as well as checking on our bees. 

We even had our first Live stream on TIKTOK after Katie joined our small team to help with marketing. The live stream was really successful with lots of people joining to see us cutting comb and making chunk honey. We are planning to do lots more so if you have TIKTOK do give us a follow!

If there’s anything you’d like to know or learn about honey or beekeeping just message us or email us and we will make sure it gets answered. 

One of the big developments this month was the arrival of our new bulk tank. When honey comes to us in barrels for our packing customers we need to warm it up. Up until now we have warmed it in the barrels and then pumped it through a strainer and in to the jarring machine. The problem is you need to try and mix the honey to get it to clear well enough.

Now with this new tank we warm the barrels slightly just enough to get it to be able to pump and then pump it in to the tank which has a water tank around it (Called a double jacket) which heats up. A stirrer mixes the 800kg of honey once an hour for 5 minutes for about 24 hours which then means the honey is clear enough to be strained and jarred with much less warming which is better for the honey. 

We can jar about 1 ton of honey a day so this tank is going to be a big leap forward for us. Although at the moment our own brand isn’t actually big enough to make full use of this tank our packing customers are and it means when our brand grows we will have the equipment set up ready to go. 

We have lots more plans moving forward including a new processing room so keep an eye out on our social media for all the updates!

Out with the bees we’ve been busy making sure they have enough food. So far we’ve been happy with how the bees are doing. The warmer than normal winter has meant the queens have continued laying and the bees are eating a lot of food. I have heard reports higher than normal losses around the UK which will be due to the bees running out of food. Every two weeks we go around and add fondant, which is bakers fondant often used in cakes, to any hives that need it. 

Over the next few weeks we will do a little video showing the process and how we decide which ones need food.

As always thank you so much for taking the time to read our short blog, your support means a lot to our small business

Matthew Ingram
Holt Hall Apiary

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January – Our busiest month ever!!

Firstly let me apologise for missing last months blog. Just after Christmas but before New Year we started our biggest ever order and unfortunately were in the if it can go wrong it will go wrong stage. January has been our biggest ever month with over 102,000 jars filled! 

I’ve had plenty of help, Misha our Bee Farmers Association Apprentice (left on the picture) has done a fantastic job and really put in the hours! Jane in the middle on the photo has also been fantastic she’s been busy as chief quality controller and mini jar pallet stacker! Mum (Christine) on the right has been amazing as ever, of course while this massive contract has been ongoing all of our regular contracts needed doing. She has worked incredibly hard managing our other filling room making sure all of our orders have gone out on time. There has also been plenty of other help, at times there have been 5 of us! Three on the automatic filling line and two next door on the semi automatic filler. 

Our production line arrived in October and had been used for a few orders but never really tested to its full capacity. When we first started doing the little jars it was manic, settings were incorrect, pipes failed, even our air compressor packed up on a bank holiday weekend with no way to get a spare!

 After the initial week of thinking no way is this possible (and everyone putting up with my growing frustration) we started to solve more problems that we gained thanks to the team who provided the production line. By the end of the first week in Jan we were seeing headway and it only got better. Our personal best was 1000 jars and hour for 3 hours straight. 

A few years ago extracting in the utility at home there was no way I could have imagined being able to process that sort of number of jars and it’s really exciting for our future! 

Outside of the honey we’ve had a few chances to check our bees. They’re looking really good with only a small percentage needing fondant which is basically cake fondant and gives the bees an emergency boost when their own stores are low.

There’s still a long way to go though with March and April the time bees are most at risk because they’ve started producing young who eat lots of food, before the flowers are out.

 

For your loved one this Valentines day why not give a heart of gold with our cute Heart Shaped Honey Jars. Full of our most popular summer honey that they’re sure to love!

As always thank you so much for your support reading our blog and buying our honey. As a very small but growing business we really appreciate it

If you ever have any questions about our bees or honey then email us on info@holthallapiary.co.uk and we will answer it in our blog 

Thank you
Matthew Ingram

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November and Winter is Certainly Here!

Well I’m sat writing this looking out on the hardest frost we’ve had so far this winter. I think as beekeepers our years go quickly because we spend half the the year waiting for winter so we can (hopefully) slow down a little and take a break and then we spend the winter waiting for spring so we can get back out and about checking our bees!

At this time of year very few checks are necessary on the hives themselves. In a couple of weeks, probably just after Christmas we will go around with fondant which is almost solid sugar to give them a boost!

November started off very nicely with an awards evening for Stafford and Birmingham Agricultural Society where I was honoured to win the Young Entrepreneur of the year award for a farm Diversification Business.

We have took the decision to stop attending Market Bosworth Farmers Market a couple of months ago and as part of reducing our markets we haven’t done as many Christmas events either. We attended Staunton Harrold Christmas Market which was absolutely beautiful and considering it was November, surprisingly warm. We only have two events left, an open night at Blabers Hall on the 1st December and 2 days at the Gift Shop at Pinwall which is a beautiful Christmas shop!

Many of you who have seen us at markets before will likely recognise my Mum, Christine who has been busy making gift sets of our Mini Jars, pouring all of the candles and manning the stalls!

 

Before I started bee farming and realising the scale of honey production I couldn’t really imagine honey in anything other than a jar, after the first year we were filling buckets and that seemed like bulk. Now we do more and more packing for larger brands that use their own honey or buy it in from others we get the privilege of seeing honey from all around the UK. 

It also means we can show you what bulk honey in the UK comes in. These 5 barrels, two on the pickup and 3 on the trailer each hold 300kg of honey, that’s over 1,300 of our size jar in each barrel! These were collected from a local bee farmer for a large customer of ours and will be packed into their own branded jars. We have a special attachment on the forklift that grabs the barrels so we can lift them on to pallets making them easier to move around the honey room. They will be gently warmed before being pumped into the jarring tank. A nice easy process that doesn’t involve the same heavy lifting that tipping buckets does!  

As always thank you for reading our blog, don’t forget we’ve got our Bee Merry (Honey infused with a mixed spice that tastes just like mince pies!!) and our Christmas Hampers too! Last post for Christmas is the 18th December so please get your orders in nice and early, your support is always very much appreciated! 

Thank you
Matthew Ingram

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Out and about in October

October has been very much a typical autumn month for us here. We’ve been busy getting the bees sorted for winter and spending an increasing amount of time in the honey room. It’s also been a chance to take a little bit of time off ahead of what we are expecting to be our busiest November and December thus far.

We started the month by visiting Chain Bridge Honey Farm just outside Berwick-Upon-Tweed. This was for the Bee Farmers Association AGM, it’s one event I never miss out on. The Tuesday afternoon we made the 4-hour drive north before meeting up with about 50 members for a meal, it’s always great to chat as it’s often the only time of year that you see others in our small industry. 

On the Wednesday we headed to Chain Bridge which is a fantastic bee farm with lots of History, they are open to the public as a tourist attraction and have amassed a collection of vehicles, cars, memorabilia from the last 70 years or so. As well as the museum you can of course see the honey room and buy lots of honey and cosmetics they make on site. They have around 1,200 hives and stock around 400 stores so it’s a fantastic opportunity for us to have a walk around and get some ideas, you almost always come back with at least one good idea from these AGMs. 

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Back with the bees we’ve been busy feeding, the hives are now finally up to weight but it’s taken longer than it has the past few years. This week the feeders are coming off and mouseguards (metal strips to stop mice getting in to the hives) are going on, especially needed as we’ve already found a few nests between the inner and outer rooves of hives. Once that’s done, we can leave them alone for a few weeks, checking once between now and Christmas to make sure they have enough food. We are taking in to winter about 160 hives with the plan to make a small increase next year to around 200. 

In the honey room our new processing line is busy at work producing more than ever, we’ve been very lucky to sign a few new big contracts so that is going to be very busy for us now. We’ve also started Bee Merry our festive spiced honey that is always so popular, and I know why… it really is delicious, just think Christmas in a jar!

We’ve only got one Market this month, Staunton Harold Winter Fayre. I think this will be one of the nicest winter shows around with an absolutely stunning venue. It runs from the 9th to the 12th November. We will have vouchers for our beekeeping experiences which have been limited this year so please book early to avoid missing out. We will also have our Christmas Hampers and little gift sets too!

 

Thank you as always for reading
Matthew Ingram

Remember if you join our hive below you get 10% off your first order and 10% off a honey of the month each month

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Hurrah for Heather Honey

Well it’s October and the end of the season is certainly upon us. Looking back at the summer and the poor weather it isn’t surprising that we’ve had a  disappointing summer crop. Some bee farmers locally saying it’s their worst season since 2012. For us the spring crop taken in June was rather good, at least as good as last year. The summer crop is where things went downhill, probably only about 50% of last year, that’s the problem with such a weather dependent crop. We are really lucky to have a group of fantastic local beekeepers we can call upon for extra honey when we need it. 

The photo (right, or below on mobile) was mid September taking off our Heather honey crop. The heather has been the saving grace of the season and was much better than we could have hoped based on the weather. 

From the Heather we get – Cut Comb which is always super popular, the Chunk Honey which, if you’ve not tried cut comb before is the ideal way to try it, and Heather Honey Jars. 

Each one is absolutely delicious and many of you reading regularly will know Heather is one of my favourite honeys. 

We’ve also been busy moving our bees to their winter sites. Most bees are back where they need to be and feeding is well underway. Most colonies are putting on weight nicely but wasps have been playing havoc and some sites are looking slightly behind. Over the next few weeks we will get the rest of their food on and the hives will be back on track!

So the massive news of September has been the arrival of our new production line. Over the past 12 months our honey packing business has been getting busier and busier. We now process for a considerable amount of other honey businesses with much larger volumes than our own. 

Over the past few years we have been using semi-automatic machines which still required considerable manual handling. With all of our hives and the packing work inside something had to change and about 3 months ago we started working with a company to piece together a production line that would help increase our capacity. 

Our new production line arrived in the first week of September, I’ve never open a crate so fast in my life, it was like Christmas. Over the next few weeks we started setting the line up before we started to put some small volumes through it. It’s fair to say there have been many… many snags and certainly some frustrating days. 

However the company we purchased the line from was fantastic and have always managed to solve the problems within 24 hours. I’m happy to say that now the line is working fantastically, we will be running the line at full capacity in the next couple of weeks. We’re expecting to be able to process at up to about 800 jars and hour! 

I’ve learnt a massive amount over the last month and it’s so exciting to see the business moving forward.

This month we don’t have any farmers markets or shows however if you want to buy from us you still can by purchasing online or supporting one of our brilliant stockists and buying through them.

Thank you all for reading and supporting 

Matthew Ingram
Holt Hall Apiary

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Autumn… already!! :(

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 

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Summer… What Summer?

Well I think like most people we’ve been waiting and wondering if a summer will ever actually arrive in the UK… I fear the answer might be that we had summer for 2 weeks in June and now it’s over! 
Many Bee Farmers that have been doing this for much longer than me are saying this will be the worst summer crop since 2012! It’s certainly the worst summer crop per hive that I’ve seen since I started my beekeeping journey 6 years ago. Luckily we have more hives than we have done in any previous season so will produce enough to keep us going which is the main thing. 

 

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This month has been a little quieter on the events than usual with just Planters Open Air Country Fair early in the month and Whitacre & Shustoke Show. 

Shustoke show was a great day out and well supported with lots of people visiting! 

We took our observation hive  which is always so popular with Children and Adults and is a great way of encouraging interest in bees safely without having to get everyone suited and booted.

One of the most common questions I get asked is how do we get them there and the answer is in the passenger seat! You’ve never driven more carefully than when you’ve got a glass box full of a 1000 or so bees sat next to you. Far more effective than a speed camera I can assure you!  (Scroll the image on the left/above to see them strapped in)

 

Paperwork… Not something that many people enjoy and probably not something that many people think of when they think of a beekeeper. In the last week we have had our SALSA audit. an extensive 5 hour audit on our food safety processes! This covers EVERYTHING from the honey coming in to the honey going out. Its a certification we choose to do which enables the products we process for ourselves and our customers to be sold in larger retailers including some supermarkets. As we offer honey packing services it’s become a crucial part of the business although it does make me nervous before hand!

I’m glad to say subject to us getting our calibration weights calibrated again we have passed our audit with less ‘improvements’ noted than last year which is a fantastic result that i’m really happy with! 

The title image is Misha with a nice trailer full of honey supers ready to be extracted! That honey has been taken from the hives we are taking on to the moors in a weeks time ahead of what we can only hope if a good flowering time in the Peak District!

We’ve got a few events this month!

5th & 6th August – Staunton Harold Artisan Market
13th – Honey tasting at the Deer park farm shop
19th August – Fillongley Agricultural Show
27th August – Market Bosworth Farmers Market   

Thank you as always for your support reading this blog and buying our honey
Matthew Ingram
Holt Hall Apiary

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June – First Harvest Completed!

When I think back to writing last months blog it seems ages ago… and yet it’s still flown by and I’m sat the night before it’s due trying to remember everything we’ve done this month!

The main excitement during June has been the successful spring harvest.

I was a bit worried in May that we weren’t going to get much of a spring crop but then the warm weather hit and the bees did exactly what they’ve evolved to do, make honey! 

We managed to extract from all our our hives during one week at the start of June. The process starts on Monday putting empty supers (boxes that hold the honey combs the bees fill) on to hives with a device called a clearing board which is basically a one way valve for bees. 

The next day we turn up and remove the full supers now void of bees and stack them on to our trailer which can be a hot job in the sun stacking 10kg boxes for an hour! We then head back to the farm and unload the pallet of supers to extract

The process of getting the honey out of the comb is fantastic and I LOVE that it hasn’t really changed in 100 years. The wax capping’s are removed exposing the honey below, then the frames are put in a centrifuge and spun for about 10 minutes, the honey is warmed slightly overnight and strained into buckets. That’s it, a completely natural product straight in to the jar! 

You can watch the process on our TIKTOK HERE

 

 

We no longer collect swarms for the general public as its a real risk for us bringing disease in to our production sites. Sometimes however we are asked to collect a swarm by someone we know and we know where the bees are from. This MASSIVE Swarm was collected in early June and it’s fantastic, it was hived straight away and within 2 weeks it had filled it’s hive and needed more space. It’s little things like this that remind you quite how amazing bees are!

We’ve been busy educating as well this month, we held our second beekeeping beginners course of 2023 which went down really well and it was a really lovely group of new beekeepers!

On Wednesday just gone we hosted Kenilworth Young Farmers for an evening trying honey, seeing the bees and of course trying on the beesuits! It’s always really rewarding seeing peoples fascination with our bees!

 

Markets for July

1&2nd July – Open Air Country Fair
23rd July – Note for our regulars, unfortunately we won’t be attending Market Bosworth Farmers Market this month.
29th July – Shustoke Show

 

As always thank you for your continued support both through online sales and reading our blog and interacting with us on Social Media, it all helps our small business to grow and reach new people

Matthew Ingram
Holt Hall Apiary

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June and the year is flying!

Well what a difference a month makes. Back at the start of May I was busy moaning about an awful spring, wettest on record and so cold. Saying how the bees had produced no spring crop and wondering what the plan was.

Fast forward to now and the honey crop is looking amazing, the bees are firing on all cylinders and we’ve gone from worrying they have too little food to worrying we can’t keep up with giving them enough space to store it all.

We’ve been really busy producing the first queens of the year. The process involves moving day old larvae from the selected breeding colony, one that we think has great qualities like calmness, disease resistance and of course, good honey production. The larvae is then placed in a colony with no queen and through natural instincts they produce queens cells which later hatch as queens.

Through this process we can produce up to about 30 queens a week which is more than enough for us to make the increase in hives that we want.

Currently while I’m sat writing this I’m just outside York having finished my first day training for a scheme called DASH – Disease Assurance Scheme for Honeybees run by The National Bee Unit part of DEFRA. This should mean I am able to manage notifiable diseases that impact honey bees in the UK as well as manage the treatment of the hive if they are found. It’s a course that I think will be really helpful to ensure our bees are as healthy and well looked after as possible while also reducing the amount of checks we have from the National
Bee Unit each year.

 

Thank you for reading our blog again this month, it’s a little shorter as i’ve been so busy but hope to do a longer one in the next few months!

We will be at The Open Air Country Fair on the 3rd and 4th June so please do come along and support lots of great local businesses.

Thank you

Matthew Ingram
Holt Hall Apiary

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