National Honey Bee Day
Raw pure honey produced from our bees.
Real raw and pure honey, produced on our family bee farm by our bees in beautiful Northumberland, UK.
Join us on our journey to bring pure honey to those who haven’t experience real honey before, or those who are looking a regular reputible supplier of real raw honey.
Quick Honey Links and FAQs
What is Raw Honey?
We are frequently asked what is raw honey? The answer is not that simple, while honey is not intended to be cooked there is no official classification of raw honey. Despite customers hearing about and using the term. Legally honey cannot be labelled as raw, which is why you don’t find the term on our labels.
Raw honey is commonly used to describe honey that is left as the bees intended, i.e not heated above hive temperature and NOT pasteurised. Alot of large scale honey is heat treated/ pasteurised to prevent granulation. Pastuerisation is know to destroy alot of the beneficial properties of honey.
To help explain what the term raw honey has come to mean we have put together a quick video below.
Fortunately our honey never goes above hive temperature and is not pasteurised. So if there was a legal definition of raw honey ours would fit neatly within the raw honey classification.
Beekeeping Practices
Beekeeping at Northumberland Honey Co is focused on sustainability. Therefore we use organic treatment methods in our beekeeping work. Working tirelessly on bee breeding to select from the best of our colonies to improve the future breeding and genetics of our honeybees.
These organic methods have significantly reduced overwintering losses and seriously improved the survivability of our honey bees. With a constant expansion of our bee numbers rather than losses.
Our accreditations speak for themselves.
We are members of The Bee Farmers Association, work to SALSA standards, and are members of the DASH scheme. DASH is administered by FERA and stands for Disease Accreditation Scheme in Honey bees. We take on apprentice beekeepers to train for a career in beekeeping, ensuring skills are passed onto the next generation, therefore helping to safeguard the future of the honey bee.
Provenance
When it comes to harvesting honey, great care is taken to ensure traceability of each jar. So we individually number our jars, thus ensuring traceability back to the very beehives that produced the honey and the location.
Provenance is important, so our gift boxes (seen below) have a map of our operating area. So from flower to jar you can be sure of where your pure raw honey comes from!
We produce honey in the Tyne valley / hadrians wall area of Northumberland, and Cumbria.
As a small team whose livelyhood depends on bees we therefore focus our efforts on providing top quality bee husbandry. We are dedicated to ensuring the survivability of honey bees and producing quality honey. Thus taking this honey on a precious journey from the bees to you with the utmost care.
What is Raw Organic Honey?
Raw organic honey is honey that is gathered by bees working only on organically certified plants.
The issue with organic honey is that bees are free to fly and visit any flower they would like! Why would we want it any other way?! Bees quite rightly want choice to fly where they like. In fact bees can fly upto 5 miles away from their hive when foraging for nectar.
In the UK there is nowhere that is solely organic within 5 miles of beehives so producers cannot label honey as organic, however, what we can do is utilise organic management methods.
We use organic methods here at Northumberland Honey Co, and produce the most natural raw and pure honey that we can just as the bees intended.
Finally, if you would like to browse the range of honey we produce, do check out the range of products below, or visit the honey section in the online shop.
Honey Availability
Finally, raw honey is very seasonal. Fortunately we keep a growing number of colonies and usually can provide honey year round. However we do advise stocking up on honey to ensure your continued supply.
We offer multi buy discounts on the range of honey. The more you spend the cheaper the jars. See the individual products in the online shop for more details.
If you order before 1pm we usually send orders the same day for next working day delivery.
As an environmentally conscious company we use a Co2 neutral delivery service and all our jars come in moulded pulp packaging with paper tape, with no plastic used.
