Our Bees & Honey
New for summer, 2026!
We are excited to introduce bees to our pasture and ecosystem!
Alongside our pasture-raised chickens, we're proud to welcome two bee hives onto our land - and it's about far more than the honey they make...
Our Hives
Meet Poppy and Blossom, our two bee hives here on the farm.
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They're named after two very important girls in our lives - Poppy, our daughter, and Blossom, our dachshund.
A colony can range from around 10,000 bees in winter up to 50,000 or more in the height of summer, all working together to forage across our pastures and the surrounding countryside.
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We're lucky to have a fantastic local beekeeper who looks after Poppy and Blossom for us, checking on their health, managing the hives through the seasons, and making sure our bees are happy, healthy, and well cared for all year round.
Boosting Biodiversity
In the UK, more than 70 different crops rely on insect pollination, and honey bees are among the most important pollinators we have.
Every trip Poppy and Blossom's bees make between our wildflowers and pasture plants helps those plants grow stronger and more diverse, which in turn supports the wider biodiversity our chickens, our land, and our local environment all depend on.
Pollinators are estimated to contribute hundreds of millions of pounds a year to the UK economy, and a healthy hive here on our fields is our small part in supporting that bigger picture.
Our Honey
Straight from our own hives, our wildflower honey is foraged from the pasture blossoms across our fields.
Our very first batch was taken from Poppy's hive on 6th August 2026 and extracted the following day, on 7th August 2026 - a true taste of that summer, straight from our fields to your table.
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To harvest it, our bees are gently brushed off the frames - a natural, low-stress way of collecting the honeycomb that avoids using any chemicals.
Temperature Care
Honey is at its best when it's treated gently. Inside a working hive, bees naturally keep the temperature around 35°C.
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Upon processing, our bee keeper never heats our honey above 40°C, staying as close to that natural hive temperature as possible.​
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As well as this, if we go beyond 40°C, the honey starts to change. The higher the temperature climbs, the more of the honey's natural character is lost - its enzymes, its pollen content, and the delicate floral aromas that give each batch its flavour.
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Many commercial honeys are heated well beyond this point during processing, typically to make the honey easier to bottle and to keep it looking clear on the shelf for longer - but it comes at the cost of much of what makes raw honey special.
Extraction
Once extracted, our honey is double strained through a coarse mesh to remove any wax particles, followed by a medium strain and then a fine strain - but only down to 200 microns.
Our bee keeper deliberately stops there, because straining any finer starts to remove the pollen and natural goodness along with it, undoing all the hard work of the bees and changing the flavour of the honey.
The result is honey that's clean and free of debris, but still as close to how it came straight from the comb as possible.
Why Local Matters
A lot of honey sold in the UK is imported, and much of it is blended from multiple countries.
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Analysis by the UK consumer group Which? found that a significant share of honey sampled from UK sources failed authenticity testing, and investigations have also flagged the scale of imports from countries where adulteration is a known risk. Because blended honeys aren't required to state their exact countries of origin or the proportions used, it can be hard to know exactly what's in the jar, or where it really came from.
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Ours is different. Every jar comes from Poppy and Blossom, our two hives right here on our own pastures in Castor, so you get the genuine, unmistakable taste of local wildflowers and blossom, not a blend of honey shipped in from who-knows-where!