Tag: Honey

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Winter jobs well underway.. roll on the spring!

When I start back to the beginning of January it seems so long ago but in many ways it’s flown by, we seem to have been very busy throughout which is great… and slightly scary as this is supposed to be the quiet part of the year!

One of the highlights was going to a Midlands and Northern Bee Farmers Association meeting at Thornes, a beekeeping shop near Grimsby. It was great to catch up with other bee farmers and compare plans for the coming season. Going to Thornes also gave me the opportunity to get the beeswax foundation  (Thin beeswax sheets that the bees use to start their comb off) and the frames that slot into the hive. One of the big jobs now is assembling all 2,500 of them and building the hive boxes that the frames will go in to! 

Misha

The most exciting part of January was without doubt welcoming Misha to our small team! Misha has joined us through the Bee Farmers Apprenticeship scheme aimed at bringing younger people into the beekeeping industry. 

At this time of year most of our jobs are indoor be it jarring honey or doing the woodworking but any chance to get out with the bees Misha takes and we’ve been able to do a few checks on the hives to make sure they have enough food and add fondant (basically like fondant icing) which is an emergency feed which should keep the bees going until the first flowers start in the Spring.

I’m hoping I can persuade Misha to write a little piece in the blog in the coming months as I think many readers will be interested in learning about routes into bee farming!

Valentines day is fast approaching so I just want to mention a couple of gifts we have. First is the Valentines day Hamper which contains a heart shaped jar of honey, a honey and oatmeal Goats Milk Soap (With label that can be planted and grows wildflower seeds!) a honey dipper and a full packet of wildflower seeds, all neatly packaged ready for gifting! 

If you’re after just something a little quirky for a bee enthusiast why not adopt a bee for just £1.90 and get an adoption certificate to download and gift!

Thank you as ever for your support by reading our blog, liking and sharing us on social media, ordering from our website or buying from our stockists. As a small business we really do appreciate all of the support especially during difficult times.

We aren’t going to be attending any markets in February but orders can be placed online and sent out. We will be back at our normal markets in March!

Matthew Ingram
Holt Hall Apiary

Please do consider joining our mailing list if you haven’t already. We don’t bombard you with emails there’s normally two per month. One to tell you our latest blog has been released and the other to send you our honey of the month, a honey we have chosen to give 10% off as an exclusive offer to our mailing list members, it’s a different honey each month. You also get 10% off your first order when you join!

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October… Its been an interesting month!

Well October went a little differently than planned! It started as normal and the bees that needed it were being fed with syrup to make sure they’re in top condition for the winter.

Unfortunately however part way through the month things went down hill. Those that know me know I’m rarely ill and also that I don’t do things by halves so.. I managed to get quite a nasty case of Glandular Fever and ended up spending two days in Hospital! 

I’m much better now but couldn’t have got everything done without the help from my Mum who many that read this blog will already know does a lot for me as well as several other people who all helped get our backlog of honey to process down! 

The bees are back on track thanks to Dad helping feed the bees when I wasn’t allowed to do any heavy lifting. So I think we can sum up by saying its been a stressful month for all but looking much better now!

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Now onto what we’ve been up to this month! It seems this month has been non-stop honey processing for us and for other brands. Many people don’t know that we actually process honey on behalf of quite a few honey brands around the UK. Their honey gets sent to us and we can process it and jar it for them under our certification. 

We have processed upwards of 8,000 jars this month alone for other brands which is brilliant and we keep picking up new customers ranging from smaller businesses and beekeepers wanting a couple of hundred jars doing through to larger businesses supplying retail chains and shipping overseas. 

Honey packing as it’s called was never something I thought we would be doing other than for ourselves but its become a really valuable asset to our small business!  

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Christmas is just around the corner and we’re so excited to  have back in stock one of our most sought after honeys, Festive Spiced. This has become a firm winter favourite with its warming spices and delicate honey flavour its a real treat at breakfast time, stirred into coffee or even by the spoonful!!

As well as our Festive Spiced Honey we also have our Christmas Hampers back in stock which contain a honey of your choice, a beeswax candle, honey dipper and packed of wildflower seeds. You can even add a gift tag for free!  

Thank you as always for your support and taking the time to read our short blog. If you ever want to learn about anything in our business send us an email with your question and we will answer it through our blog!

This month we have two markets on the same weekend

Middleton Hall Christmas Market – 26th and 27th November
Market Bosworth Farmers Market – 27th November

We look forward to seeing you there
Matthew Ingram

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Winter is coming!

Well this month the weather has given me all the excuse I need to come in and write my blog. I’m actually writing this two days  before the deadline (a miracle) owing mainly to the dull and damp weather we have had the last day or so. The overnight temperatures are certainly starting to push the bees into winter mode and their numbers are dramatically reducing as they do each year. Our large production colonies that may have had 60,000+ workers at their peak just a month or two ago but will now be on their way down to around 10,000. 

Our honey harvest is nearly over with just a bit of Heather left to process. Despite the very very dry weather and poor start to the year the bees have generally performed well and yielded lots of honey which is great for us. 

After we harvest the honey we strain it into buckets where it’s stored until we need it. Then we gently warm the bucket up so that it’s runny and it goes through our jarring machine we then hand label it and send it out.  

The photo shows some of our honey buckets. For those that have been following for sometime you will know that we had a new much larger honey room last year that was supposed to last a very long time and already it’s looking a bit on the full side!! eek!

 

The bees are back from their trip up north. Although only last month I was talking about them having gone up to the Peak District this month the heather has finished and the early start was once again happening. Bringing them back is worse though because you have to set off extra early to get the bees loaded up before they start flying. So at 4am off we go. We made great time and loading the trailer only took 40 minutes which was great. Our issue came when we got stuck in traffic on the way home. What the people behind us must have though seeing beehives with bees moving around under the net must have though, I was just glad we put the net on! 

Heather is an amazing crop – Dr Adrian Charlton of FERA has found that Heather Honey contains 10x the amount of the essential nutrient Manganese than other honeys. He tested 200 other honeys including Manuka. It is also now the second largest source of Manganese in the world. 

If you’ve never heard of Manganese then here is a bit about it: Manganese is an essential mineral. As well as its high antioxidant qualities, it plays a role in helping to make and activate enzymes in the body involved in protecting tissues from damage and in the metabolism of nutrients. It also helps maintain healthy bones. 

This month we are a bit quieter on the markets with only two in:

  1. 22nd &23rd October – Open Air Country Fair at Planters Garden Centre
  2. 23rd October – Market Bosworth Farmers Market 
As always thank you for reading our blog, if you have any beekeeping questions get in touch by emailing info@holthallapiary.co.uk
 
Matthew Ingram
Holt Hall Apiary
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September – Autumn already!

As ever August has proved to be a busy month with harvest in full swing! I’m happy to say that the last of our honey was harvested on the 30th August apart from our Heather honey that will be in a few weeks!

The crop has ended up being fairly average due to the dry weather but it’s our biggest crop to date as we have more hives than we ever have done before! 

August has also seen the end of experiences, we’ve run over 50 courses this year so as much as I love meeting new people and showing off the wonders of beekeeping I was ready to have a small break! On the experiences note – after almost 4 seasons doing experiences we have decided not to offer any more for sale for 2023. As we have got busier and busier we are having to pick and choose areas of the business to expand and other to contract. For those with a voucher don’t worry we will still honour any outstanding vouchers during 2023! Hopefully we will be able to bring them back in the not too distant future. 

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The Heather Move!

One of the most stressful yet fantastically rewarding parts of the season comes in the form of moving 28 (10 more than last year) hives on a trailer up the M1 to the peak district!

The process takes a couple of days to get the hives in the correct configuration with plenty of food and strapped ready to be moved. 

On the moving day we start early, about 4:30am and go and close all of the entrances up before carefully loading the hives onto the trailer, we can stack the hives 2 high, we might be able to go 3 high but i’m not that brave just yet!!

A net goes over the hives just to make sure if we were to break down and the entrances came open the bees would be confined to the trailer but importantly it allows for good ventilation which the bees need.

When we reached our destination (traditionally called a Heather Stance)we placed the pallets down before we started to unload the hives and open the entrances. 

Helping me this year was Will who had never done any beekeeping before so thrown in the deep end would be an understatement!

The move went well and we returned home a little over 5 hours after we set off.

Hopefully next time I will be able to tell you about the harvest of our heather honey which should be around mid September so look out for our Chunk, Comb and Heather for sale again soon!

I couldn’t not mention our very exciting news this month! Winning our very first Great Taste Award for our runny honey!

 

Thank you as ever for reading our blog, your support and feedback is always very much appreciated. 

Our markets this month are:
Open Air Country Fair – Planters garden Centre, 3rd & 4th September
Fillongley Show – 17th September
Middleton Hall Autumn Market – 24th & 25th September
Market Bosworth Farmers Market – 25th September

We look forward to seeing you at one of our markets
Matthew Ingram

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Harvest Time Is Here!

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

 

Matthew Ingram
Holt Hall Apiary

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July…already, where’s this year gone?!

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! 

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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!

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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!

Thank you
Matthew Ingram
Holt Hall Apiary

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Flying Into June

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! 

 

Brand New Flavour!

Blackcurrant infused Honey!!
Shop Now!

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!

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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

Matthew Ingram
Holt Hall Apiary 

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Where did spring go?!

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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Join our mailing list to get a one off 10% voucher and receive the honey of the month offer which is 10% off our honey of the month. Don’t worry we don’t bombard you with emails! You will get one that tells you our monthly blog has been released and one with the monthly offer and you can un-subscribe at any time

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. 

We’ve got a couple of markets and events on too:

Thank you as always for reading our little blog and supporting our small business

Matthew Ingram
Holt Hall Apiary

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July – A busy Month!

Hi everyone, firstly I need to apologies for missing the blog post two weeks ago. It’s been a very busy month and next month looks like it will be the same, because of that I’ve decided that until October I will post once a month before going back to twice a month in November! So this post is just a quick one on what I’ve been up to this month and what we’ve got coming up.

Our beekeeping experiences have really taken off this month we’ve got between 2 and 4 booked every week from the start of July to the end of August so if you have a voucher and you’ve not yet booked in, take a look at the dates that we still have available – here. I’m glad to say we have had lots of great positive feedback about the experience and everyone has gone away with an even greater fascination about bees than they had before!

In early July we attended Whitacre and Shustoke Show, It was a really nice day and we were very lucky with the weather! We took along a glass observation hive for people to see which was a big hit, especially with children. We were so busy I even had to get my sister to come and help on the stand! One of the things that really stood out for me was how many people mistook our bees for wasps!!!

Despite the rain we had a lovely day celebrating one of our stockists, The Cheese Gin and Ale Barn, 5th birthday by attending a market at Curborough Country Side Centre filled with great produce from lots of their other local suppliers! To any looking for somewhere nice to go for a couple of hours shopping I highly recommend popping over to Curborough.

The bees have also been busy this month with us having a really good flow (flow just means that the plants are producing nectar) and we’ve seen the hives grow substantially. We’ve also been busy making new hives up and we are at the time of writing this at 76 hives. Swarming has certainly reduced as I’ve not been called to collect one for at least 3 weeks now.

One of the highlights of this month for me was welcoming Stephen from Bee Craft magazine to our honey room to write an article on our new honey extraction services. After a few snags with getting his frames to fit into the extractor we were underway. We had a great talk about beekeeping, extracted lots of honey and had plenty of pictures taken (Not sure I liked that bit as much!). (Photo credit below: Bee Craft Magazine)

August is set to be another busy month for us with honey to be harvested towards the end of the month and a few shows and events as well. On the 11th August we will be at Fillongley Show with our honey, gifts and insect houses as well as our glass observation hive so you can come and see our bees working! On the 25th August we will be attending an event at Kingsbury Water Park with our observation hive, the event is all about educating people about bugs with a focus on bees! It’s a free event but would be great especially with children with lots going on including bug hunts around the waterpark!

Thank you for reading this quick update, as ever thank you for your support
Matthew Ingram
Holt Hall Apiary

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Harvesting Our Honey

Wow, what a difference a week makes! We’ve gone from constant rain to beautiful sunshine and hot weather and the bees loving it! This week we have been able to make up another 7 hives (This is a topic for a future post) so we are that bit closer to our goal of 100 hives for the year! Anyway this post is about how the honey gets from our bees to you!

Getting Honey Off The Hive

To get the supers (Not sure what these are check out our post about parts of the bee hive – here) off the hive without many bees in them we use something called a clearing board. Essentially this is a flat board with a hole in the centre, this hole has a mesh cone covering it so that the bees can get through it to go down to the rest of the hive but they can’t get back in. Essentially a one way valve for bees!

This removes about 95% of the bees the rest of them fly to the window in the first extracting room so when we take them through into the second room where they get extracted there are no bees (although one does occasionally hitch a ride through the PVC curtain!)

Capped honey that’s been cleared of bees

Getting Honey Out Of The Comb

The honey is in the beeswax comb covered over with a thin layer of wax that the bees make so that the honey doesn’t absorb water and spoil. Our first job is to cut or scrape the capping wax off the frames. There can be a lot of honey left in this wax so at the end of the process we squeeze it through a small press, similar to a fruit press to get every last drop of honey out! Even the wax doesn’t go to waste as we make candles and other products from it!

Cappings being removed

Once the frames have been uncapped we place them in a centrifuge, ours holds 20 frames and uses an electric motor to spin them up to 200 RMP although we rarely get it going that fast because it can break the delicate beeswax structure.

The frames spinning on by!

The honey spins out against the sides and runs out through a valve at the bottom through a fine strainer, the strainer doesn’t remove any of the goodness or pollen from our honey it simply stops you getting a jar full of bits of wax and while some people like having wax in there honey lots of people don’t. If you do want completely unfiltered honey then let us know at info@holthallapiary.co.uk and we can get you a jar next time we harvest!

It’s hard to get a good picture of the underside of the strainer I really didn’t want to drop the camera in!

To The Jar!

Our honey sits in a bucket for a minimum of one day to allow any air to rise to the top so you don’t get white bubbles in your jar which doesn’t look too good on a shelf. Some of the honey will remain in buckets longer as storage because between us I don’t really enjoy jarring up honey! I should just say that the length of storage has no impact on the quality of the honey!

Previously to filling we will have washed and sterilised the jars we need to fill.

To jar the honey the buckets are poured gently, trying to incorporate as little air as possible, into a jarring tank that has a clean cut valve to stop the drips once the jar is full. Each jar is placed on a set of scales under the valve and each jar is filled by hand, with all the practice I’ve had I can now fill them to about +/- 1g which is as good as a machine… just a little slower!

The jars are sealed and the anti tamper label is added. We then add the best before sticker to the bottom of the jar and the main label. New for this year we have numbered labels, this means that we can track each jar from the hive to when it was extracted, stored and jarred, its hard to beat that level of traceability, if you’ve got one of our jars and you want to know that information fill in the form HERE and we will get back to you ASAP!

Thank you for reading this quick post, I’d really love to hear from you with ideas for blog posts, new product ideas or any feedback you’ve got! If you would like to help then please fill out the form below

Matthew Ingram