Breaking the Beekeepers' Code: Beekeeping's Greatest Secrets Revealed

How I get the best possible tasting honey by mixing all of the different tastes together

Where you can buy proper heated blended honey from. None of that namby-pamby unmixed stuff here.

My personal collection of apiary porn, accrued over the years — hardcore hives, explicit extractions, and rapeseed you can only fantasize about

Email address and telephone for availability of honey plus diary.

A typical honey factory. Notice the carefully placed barbed wire. This is to keep the leprechauns out. Leprechauns are the sworn enemies of beekeepers.

My name is John Pollard. I have been a small-scale honey pusher for nearly 35 years: my father was a beekeeper from 1940 until around 1980.

The mission of this website is to explain why I think that most beekeepers make a bit of a mistake in the way they prepare honey for sale.

It would be nice to say that the method I use is based on what my father did, but it wouldn't be true. My enlightenment came from one of the directors/senior managers in the original Cranks Health food shop back in the 1970s. I salute her.

She said "John, just lurk outside of school playgrounds, and when the teachers aren't looking, lean over the fence and say 'Pssst! Kids! Want to try some of the good stuff? The first jar is free.'."

Honey is one of the few foods on sale which can be obtained in a pure form: i.e. no flavouring added and none of the bad stuff, pollutants, and extra chemicals taken out — just like "mineral water bottled at the source". Also, properly harvested, it can be a very rare foodstuff indeed: one which has not been processed. Bees make honey and their "production" happens without human intervention. What man does can only degrade a lucrative perfect product.

Comb honey is the easiest route to that moneyspinner perfection: the comb is simply removed from the hive and put in a (usually) plastic container. The 'capped' wax honey cells seal the flavour in. However comb honey is expensive in the sense that the bees use a lot of resources making the wax 'packaging' which they would otherwise recycle. You also tend to end up with bits of wax in your porridge.

What is wanted is a way of retaining as much of the quality of the comb honey when it is simply put into the standard glass jar, and a way of not getting bits of wax stuck in one's teeth when one is drinking honey tea.

To do this, we use phlogiston. Phlogiston is a secret ingredient, passed along from beekeeper to beekeeper by word of mouth. It's the monosodium glutamate of the beekeeping world, and just as good for you as MSG is. Don't let those fake studies where rats died mislead you. We take all of the different types of honey — rape, apple, pear, and so forth — heat them until they are nice and runny, put them all into a big vat, mix them together, and then add phlogiston. The best tasting honey has been mixed and left on the boil for at least a week, so that all of those nasty apple tastes disappear.

Mixed honey with phlogiston. You know that it makes sense.