Well just like that the end of the season is looming over us! It seems only 5 minutes since we were moving bees out to sites for the Oil Seed Rape back in March and what a mixed season we have had. Cold damp start followed by a hot, very hot and then cool but extremely dry summer. I can barely keep up as the weather changes yet again!
This month I feel like I’ve been away from the bees doing paperwork almost as much as looking after the bees themselves. We have been working towards ‘Safe and Local Supplier Approval’ (SALSA) a food safety accreditation that will allow us to sell into bigger chains and even some supermarkets. It’s not just for us though, we are planning to do even more jarring for other honey brands as we move forward. I’m happy to say that all the paperwork paid off and we passed our rigorous audit last week after producing 104 new policies, procedures and record sheets, a massive relief!
As well as paperwork we have been busy getting harvest underway! We have only harvested from two of our site so far but we are ready for the next few over the next week.
We have helped South Staffordshire Beekeeper Association by harvesting their fantastic haul and we jarred some of it for them as well! How amazing do these 1lb jars look?!
Away from harvesting we have been at markets and shows pretty much every weekend through July which have been well attended and a massive thank you to everyone who has been and supported us!
I’m going to keep this months blog short and sweet, if you ever have questions about bees, beekeeping or honey then send us an email to info@holthallapiary.co.uk and we will feature it in our next blog!
Come along and see us at Market Bosworth Farmers Market on the 4th Sunday August 9am- 1:30pm
I always enjoy sitting down and writing our blog, even if it does always seem to be the last minute. I enjoy looking back over the month to really think about what we’ve been up to because in the middle of the season the weeks seem to go by like theirs no tomorrow and its easy to forget what you did yesterday let alone the start of the week!
This photo is one of my favourites of this month. Taken on our stall at Market Bosworth Farmers Market (4th Sunday of each month) Although this is actually a honey bee so wouldn’t use an insect hotel which are designed for solitary bees I loved how it was just having a little rest there looking over our stall.
One thing I do want to mention is that we get a lot of calls to collect swarms and unfortunately due to how busy we are and the risk of bringing disease into our sites we are no longer collect swarms. If you go to the British Beekeepers Association website – https://www.bbka.org.uk/find-a-local-swarm-collector you can get the details of lots of local beekeepers who are volunteering to collect swarms!
Last month I promised I would talk you all through our honey harvesting process which we did back in May and will be doing again towards the end of July. We generally do 3 harvests each year our spring one for Soft set honey, Our July/August one for Runny Honey and our September one for Heather honey!
Our first stage is on the hives adding something called clearing boards which are like one way valves for bees. The bees can work their way down but then can’t get back up to the supers (boxes holding the honey) and the next day we can take it off and bring it back in to our processing room!
Next up we have to warm the boxes a little back to around 35 degrees just so the honey runs a bit quicker but not to warm to damage the honey or soften the wax too much.
The warmed frames go through an uncapping machine, I used to do them all by hand but now this machine does the job using two heated knives to remove the wax on the outside of the frame exposing the honey below!
The wax isn’t wasted though its squeezed using a press below which release all of the extra honey and leaves dry curls of beeswax which is then melted at the end of the season into lovely blocks of beeswax!
The uncapped frames are moved into our extractor and although now it’s run by electric not by hand the idea behind the extractor hasn’t changed for around 100 years! The frames are spun around for about 10 minutes and by the end almost all the honey has been removed.
The honey goes into a big tank to be warmed overnight and the wax floats to the top so we can just let it run through a strainer and into a bucket and hey presto the end product is made!!
When we are ready we pump the honey into the jars pop a label on it and our favourite runny honey is ready for the market stall or farm shop!
Even with big equipment the extracting process can take a long time sometimes but over the past few years we have really got to grips with it and can process faster than ever. We even help other beekeepers by extracting their honey for them because believe me it can make a right mess if you aren’t careful!
Before I finish I just want to quickly mention all of our markets this month because its a busy time for us!
2-3rd July – Open Air Country Fair at Planters Garden Centre Tamworth
9th July – Middleton Hall Summer Fair, this is our first time but we’ve been told its a great fair!
16th July – Shustoke Show, really excited for this one as the last time we were able to do it was 2019 and we’ve grown so much since then. A great family event with loads to come and see!
24th July – Market Bosworth Farmers market
As ever I must say a big thank you to you all supporting us buying directly from us through the website, at our shows and fairs and also through our stockists!
Well I can’t quite believe how quickly May has gone, but strangely looking back to the first week of May seems such a long time ago!
May is traditionally a very busy month in beekeeping and this year has been no exception. With honey harvesting and processing, swarms left, right and centre, queen bee production and of course the start of our beekeeping experiences all going ahead at full steam!
Queen rearing is one of the most interesting tasks of the year, a real challenge to even experienced beekeepers. Producing queens from our best stock allows us to produce great quality colonies that can produce plenty of honey. These queen cells (above, or left) were soon going to be ready to hatch into mini hives called mating nucs that are designed to allow the queen to go on ‘mating flights’ and become a laying queen before she goes into a full hive. These mating nucs really are tiny only around 300 workers compared to full colonies with up to 60,000! Just a couple of weeks ago I enjoyed being invited to talk to Sutton Beekeepers about increasing your hive numbers and of course we chatted about producing queens as well!
If you haven’t already noticed on our social media or even at one of our markets we’ve had our R&D hats on over the past couple of month and have finally released our AMAZING blackcurrant honey, its super smooth soft set honey with tangy blackcurrant. It’s really fruity but as we always we want the honey to be key and so you get the delicious honey aftertaste. I taste an awful lot of honey, be it ours or other company’s that we work with and this has become a new favourite of mine!
To anyone that has been on one of our experiences this year these three hives will look familiar! We have been busy with our first month of beekeeping experiences. If you have a voucher and haven’t booked yet then please do get yourself booked in ASAP and come and meet our bees!
A different note and one that the beekeepers reading this will I’m sure have experience of is Swarming. Swarms are the bane of beekeepers lives between April and August. The bees become congested if we don’t give them more room and eventually they decide to split the hive in two with around 1/3 of the workers and the queen leaving the hive. They leave behind queen cells and one of those hatched queens takes over the colony several weeks later. Some years are worse than others and by all accounts we aren’t the only ones seeing lots of swarms happening or at least trying to! Just part and parcel of beekeeping but it keeps us on our toes!
I want to spend more time talking about honey harvesting which we have just finished (on the day of publish…hopefully) so in our next blog I’ll walk you through that process so you can see exactly how it’s made. It’s been a strange crop with the weather having been so up and down so that has led to some more tricky extracting but if you can’t wait a month to see how it’s made if you have TIKTOK you can find a video walk through on there!
Thank you all as always to reading our blog it really does mean a lot to me! Come along and see us at some of our markets this month:
Open Air Country Fair – 4th & 5th June 10am – 3:30pm Planters Garden Centre, B78 2EY Market Bosworth Farmers Market – 26th June 9am – 1:30pm Market Bosworth
Well I’m conscious that every month I seem to be talking about the weather but I think that does quite a good job of explaining farmers and specifically Bee Farmers main worries!
The start of April was met with warm weather and damp conditions overnight, perfect for bees and flowers! The Oil Seed Rape was out in bloom a couple of weeks ahead of last year and all looked good with the bees producing lots of honey. Fast forward 2 weeks and the ground is now very dry and the warm temperatures are a long forgotten, the bees are now in a sort of limbo where they have started building up for spring because of the early ‘flow’ but are now just holding steady waiting for the weather to change.
On a more positive note we have been busy with other jobs this month. We moved bees to a brand new site for us at The Barn at Berryfields in Meriden. This Restaurant and farm shop aim to be as self sufficient as possible and it really shows in the quality of the produce! We were already stocking honey there but when we were asked if we wanted to have bees on site we jumped at the chance!
Away from the hives we had an outing to Stratford Butterfly Farm another one of our great stockists to talk to their guests about honey bees. We set up with our observation hive (Which has had a lovely new paint job since last year, thanks to Christine aka Mum) We had so many interested people through which prompted us to decide that we would take the bees to the Open Air Country Fair on the 30th April.
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Coming up this month we have experiences starting which is very exciting, it Seems like a long time since we last ran experiences but it will soon come flooding back to me! We are also sending out our first queens of the year to those with pre-orders towards the end of May.
Well if I had been writing this a week ago I’d have been talking about the beautiful weather and how great it was that the season was well underway. Fast forward a week however and we are plunged back into cold weather. Or at least it seems cold after that warm spell, I think it’s actually quite normal remembering back two years to the Beast From The East that hit right at the end of March 2020.
The main problem for beekeepers with the warm and then sudden cold temperature is that the bees have been out collecting nectar and pollen and the size of the hive has increased with more and more eggs being laid everyday but as the cold weather has come in it has stopped the ability of the bees to collect food which has put the bees in a risky area! They can very quickly run out of food at this time of year if we as beekeepers aren’t keeping an eye on them.
One of the main jobs we’ve been doing over the past week or so is moving our hives. Now unfortunately I forgot to take any pictures but I do have one from last year and the process is much the same.
First we remove any feeders and lids and use small straps to tie the hive together so that it won’t come apart during transit. Then on the morning of the move we lift the hives onto the trailer having first covered the entrance with masking tape so the bees can’t get out!!
Once on the trailer we make sure they are strapped down to the trailer with a second strap and away we go! When we arrive on the new site which at the moment are Oil Seed Rape (OSR) sites we just reverse the process!
The bees are out and re-orientating within a couple of minutes and soon start making use of the new food source!
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Thank you all for reading our blog, next month I’m hoping to come back with a delicious honey recip-bee to get your mouth’s watering and some more updates on how the season has started… hopefully! If you’re wanting more content from us then I’m happy to say we’ve joined TIKTOK and you can now see lot’s of short videos about our beekeeping all month! We really are embracing Social media during April and hopefully we will be doing a Facebook/Instagram Live for you all to watch and see exactly what we are up to and to ask any questions.
Also don’t forget that by signing up to our mailing list below you’ll get blog updates and an email around the middle of each month with an offer which is 10% off one of our honeys so that’s a great way to keep in touch and save a little each month!
Well, the 28th soon snuck up on me! Once again i’m writing our blog a day before it’s due to go out, you’d have thought after two years writing these I’d have got the hang of it!
February has been a fairly typical winter month here, we’ve been busy jarring and working in the workshop to get all our boxes and frames ready for the season. The plan for this season is to increase to 200 hives… which means lots more hives need building and the wooden frames that go in those need assembling.
One of the most exciting thing that’s been happening this month is increase in stockists! We have taken on about five new stockists in the past month and hopefully many more throughout March!
The first of the real spring flowers are out now, Snowdrops, Crocus and Hellebores are out and providing fantastic early food for our bees! I often get asked about planting for bees. I think the best thing many of us can do is to try hard to provide early, and late flowering plants that extend the season of our pollinators of course this doesn’t just help Honey bees, it helps bumble bees and Solitary bees as well as butterflies and other key pollinators.
Pictured is an early flowering variety of an ornamental Cherry tree. For those following our social media you’ll have seen the video of the bees making the most of this tree in the sun last week!
Of course I can’t do an update about this month without mentioning the few weeks of terrible weather where it seemed storm after storm was coming through. The wind worries me more than any other weather during the winter, the hive roofs are fairly light so even with bricks on top they’re known to blow off leaving bees with little shelter from the almost certain rain that follows! I’m very happy to say however that our sheltered wintering sites did their jobs and kept the worst of the weather off the hives and so we didn’t lose any roofs and the bees are still all looking healthy and well! Over the next couple of weeks we will start doing more frequent checks to ensure they have enough food because as the weather warms up the amount the queen lays increases causing the bees to rapidly use up their stores!
This month also saw the launch of our brand new bee Jewellery! Two beautiful pieces hand made especially for us. Watch this space though because we have plenty more coming as well!
I must also mention that Mothering Sunday is the 27th March! We have our beautiful Honey Hampers back in stock with amazing updated labels!
You get: 1 jar of Honey, a beeswax candle, Honey dipper, Wildflower seeds and an information card about us and our bees!
Thank you all so much for reading our little update and as ever supporting us! Next month I’ll be telling you all about how we have got on moving bees to their spring sites ready for the Oil Seed Rape to come out in April.
Come along and see us at Market Bosworth Farmers Market on the 27th March from 9am until 1:30pm
Thank you Matthew Ingram
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Sitting back to write this blog I started like I always do by looking through my phone for photos I’ve taken. January seems to have been an incredibly long month, and I’m not usually one to be wishing time to go by!
Earlier this month we treated our bees with something called Oxalic Acid. This scary sounding compound is actually organic and is what makes Rhubarb leaves poisonous. We use it as a way to kill off Varroa mite a tiny mite that lives on Honey bees. Left to their own devices they can have a real impact on the bees health eventually killing off the hive in many cases. January treatment is ideal because the bees have very little brood so the mite are all exposed when we trickle the syrup mixed with Oxalic acid down over them.
Honey Jarring
Much of the past few weeks seems to have been taken up with Jarring Honey. As well as our own jarring we have also had honey to do for another brand we work with. Around 1,800 jars for them so it’s kept us busy during the past week or so!
What’s really interesting with packing for other brands is getting to taste honey from all around the UK. It gives you a real appreciation for just how amazing honey is!
Lots of jars just in!
New Products!!
This month we have had an influx of new products come in with our brand new soaps from Soaplantables a company that makes natural goat milk soaps with an amazing label that can be planted to grow wildflower seeds! The Lavender is certainly a favourite of mine!
One of our other new products you may have already seen on our social media and that’s these beautiful Valentines day honeys!
Our New Look
I’m sure many of you will have noticed since January our website has started changing somewhat!
I’m really excited that Angie, our new Graphics designer is helping us to really bring the brand to life by showing off what we want to bee! An independent bee farm producing Great British Honey! I think showing our story is a really important thing to do so that you, our customers can see exactly where your honey is from and more importantly how it got to you!
We want to make sure we get it right so if you have any feedback over changes we’ve made I’d love to hear from you so that we know our customers are happy!
Thank you all for reading this month’s blog, hopefully you’ve enjoyed finding out what we have got going on and what we have been busy doing!
This month our only market is Market Bosworth on the 27th February so we hope to see you there!
Matthew Ingram Holt Hall Apiary
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Happy New Year! Firstly I want to thank you for your support through 2021. I know many of you that read our blog regularly also come and see us at markets, on local delivery runs or support us via one of our stockists and have become very loyal to our honey – which is something I cannot thank you enough for.
As we’ve been coming up to the end of the year I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about all that we have achieved throughout 2021. I’m really happy to say that we have taken on lots of new stockists and packing customers this year which has really helped to move our business up a level. We have filled around 16,000 jars in the past 12 months – it’s really making the 9 jars I filled in my first year beekeeping look extra small!
Beekeeping experiences have also proved very popular, after 2020 when we couldn’t run many courses 2021 seemed a welcome change and we ran well over 50 sessions. It’s looking like 2022 will be just as busy and as many have asked for them we have listened and are now providing full day introduction to beekeeping courses for those wishing to take on beekeeping as a hobby.
Beekeeping Experience Hive protected from Mice this winter using a mouse guard
One of the most exciting things about this year has been the return to markets and shows. As a small business a lot of our revenue is earned at farmers markets and shows and we have been so lucky that so many of you have come out and supported us and fellow stall holders, especially in the run up to Christmas.
We now have a small winter break from markets, we will only be attending Market Bosworth Farmers Market this month which is on the 23rd January.
This Months Recip-bee
Bee Berry Breakfast
And just like that we are into 2022, with this in mind, we have chosen a recipe that will kick start your year and give a twist on the classic consumption of crumpets. We used frozen berries for this breakfast recipe and found that the juice really helped to deliver a great flavour when paired with the honey drizzled on top! As always, please share feedback and photos!
Ingredients
2 Crumpets
A handfull of berries (We used frozen raspberries from the garden)
Toast the Crumpets until golden brown and spread the Almond or peanut butter generously over them
Place your chosen berries on top of the crumpets and drizzle over the honey!
Enjoy straight away while warm for a delicious start to your day!
Thank you all for reading our blog and your continued support in helping our small business grow, I’m excited to write this blog article again in 12 months time to see how much we have managed to grow.
Matthew Ingram Holt Hall Apiary
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Happy December everyone, on account of snow today I’ve decided to write the blog and unusually it’s not the day before it’s supposed to be published…but not far off! November is traditionally a quieter time in bee farming and I was very lucky to get away for a weeks holiday early in the month coming back ready and refreshed for getting orders out in the run up to Christmas and starting prep for next season.
As we usually see during the winter months we have had a slight uptick in honey packing orders (that’s jarring for other people) which at least means you get to stay out of the cold in the honey room which stays lovely and warm year round!
The bees are all well and keeping warm and most importantly dry in their hives! Over the next week or two we will be adding fondant to each hive as an extra safety measure to make sure that they always have enough food as winter into early spring is the riskiest time of year for honey bees!
Many of you will have seen the black and white image on our social media, I was very excited to find this photo as I’ve known its existence for a couple of years but without being able to find it. The man beekeeping in the photo is my Great Great Grandpa, Charles! We think this photo would be around 70 years old but maybe even older and what’s even more amazing is that these beehives are only about 20m from where I first started beekeeping quite by chance!
I thought with 25 days left until the big day I would show off our top 5 Christmas gifts for anyone looking for a bee lovers present or stocking filler!
Honey Lovers Gingerbread! (Adapted from BBC Good Food)
In the run up to the festive season what could be more perfect than gingerbread! These biscuits are perfect and only require the cupboard staples! I iced these with royal icing, but it took all my willpower not to eat them as they came out the oven! They will leave you with a wonderful batch of biscuits and a festive smell in the kitchen! You can use either ginger Infused or festive spiced honey for a wonderful flavour!
STEP 1 Heat the butter, honey and sugar together in a small pan until melted, stirring occasionally. Set aside to cool slightly.
STEP 2 Mix together the bicarb, ginger, cinnamon and flour in a large bowl. Pour in the buttery syrup mixture and stir to combine, then use your hands to bring together to form a dough. The dough will be soft at this point, but it’ll firm up in the fridge.
STEP 3 Put the dough on a sheet of baking parchment, shape into a rectangle, and lay another sheet of parchment on top of it. Roll the dough out to a thickness of ½cm. Transfer to a baking sheet to keep it flat, leaving the parchment in place, then chill in the fridge for 1 hr.
STEP 4 Heat the oven to 190C/170C fan/gas 5 and line a large baking sheet with more baking parchment. Remove the dough from the fridge and cut out shapes using a cookie cutter. We used some amazing bee themed cutters but any shape will do!
STEP 5 Place the shapes, spread apart, on the lined baking sheet, and bake for 10-12 mins. (Depending on the size of the cutters you use, they might need a few minutes more or less cooking in the oven). Leave to cool completely on the baking sheet.
STEP 6 Meanwhile, mix the icing sugar with 1-2 tbsp water – you want to create a consistency that’s thick and pipeable, and not too thin or it will run. Decorate the cooled biscuits with the icing using a piping bag with a thin nozzle.
This month we have two markets so please make sure you come along and see us for Christmas gift inspiration!
Thank you all for reading our blog, hopefully you have enjoyed seeing our amazing old photo, and got a few Christmas gift ideas too! If you do decide to make the delicious recip-bee do send us a picture or post it on social media!
Matthew Ingram Holt Hall Apiary
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I’m happy to say that our honey room has now been complete for about two weeks, I’m really happy with it and the transformation from its previous use as a disused milking parlour to its new lease of life is unbeliveable!
Our first real use of the new honey room (other than storage) was processing Heather Honey. We’ve been really happy with our crop producing over 25lb per hive that went to the Heather Moors. The very best comb is used to make our Cut Comb, then the smaller peices of comb get used for Chunk Honey and everything else gets pressed through a machine called a Screw Press which squeezes out the honey, and leaves us with beeswax that we can use for our wax products. The honey is then filtered and jarred to produce our limited edition Heather Honey.
Back to our new room, my grandpa stopped milking in 1991 and since then, the milking parlour has mainly be used for strorage. The first job was to strip out all of the old electrics and take out the large ceiling that was used to house the feed that would drop down to the cattle while they were being milked. Taking the ceiling out really made a mess and it was hard to see just what it would become, but the next job was just as big. The milking parlour trench had to be uncovered and filled in with the new floor drains fitted.
The insulated panels arrived next, and with some help we managed to get the panels and roof up in around three days. We knocked through to our existing honey room and the flooring company were then in for a few days to level the floor and put down the new flooring!
Unfortuantely the door was one of the last things to arrive due to shipping issues but that meant there was plenty of time for the electrians and plumbers to get finished off. The new room has two heated pods which can heat up to around 45 degrees which is as hot as we need for warming honey. Each pod would warm up to 1,800 kg of honey, far more than we need at the moment but it’s been built with expansion in mind!
This Month’s Recip-bee
Honey Honey Comb! (Adapted from BBC Good Food)
Happy November! We have decided to go for a classic this month relating to Bonfire Night, which is known for Cinder Toffee. In a true Holt Hall Apiary style, we have shaken things up by literally putting the honey in honeycomb. This recipe was made with our warming Cinnamon Honey, but would work with any of our honeys! As always, please share pictures of your creations to info@holthallapiary.co.uk
STEP 1 – Butter a 20cm square tin. Stir the caster sugar and Honey together in a deep saucepan over a gentle heat until the sugar has melted. Try not to let the mixture bubble until the sugar grains have disappeared.
STEP 2 – Once completely melted, turn up the heat a little and simmer until you have an amber coloured caramel (this won’t take long), then as quickly as you can, turn off the heat, tip in the bicarbonate of soda and beat in with a wooden spoon until it has all disappeared and the mixture is foaming. Scrape into the tin immediately – be careful, the mixture will be very hot.
STEP 3 – The mixture will continue bubbling in the tin, simply leave it and in about 1 hr-1 hr 30 mins the honeycomb will be hard and ready to crumble or snap into chunks.
This month we have two markets so please make sure you come along and see us for Christmas gift inspiration!
13th & 14th November – Open Air Country Fair, Planters at Bretby 10am – 3:30pm 28th Novemeber – Market Bosworth Farmers Market, 9am – 1:30pm
Thank you all for reading our blog, I’m hoping as winter arrives and I get more time I will be able to share more with you and show you some more of our honey room and spring preparation!
Matthew Ingram Holt Hall Apiary
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