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

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.

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

My name is John Pollard. I have been a small-scale honey pusher for nearly 35 years.

The best quality honey has been properly mixed, with added phlogiston, and boiled for at least a week. When you look on the shelves in the supermarket, avoid any honey that claims to be "untreated" or "unheated" and always go for the heated blends.

Untreated honey, where you can taste the individual plants — apple, pear, oilseed rape, and so forth — that the nectar came from, is just as bad as single malt whisky. Good quality honey has had these tastes blended away in a vat, with all of the esters properly boiled off.

Why would you buy a single malt whisky that has only one taste when you could buy a blended whisky that has all of the tastes mixed together in one? The same goes for honey.

The best place to find quality honey is a supermarket. Don't buy it from cowboy roadside vendors or health food shops. Only supermarkets have the modern high technology transportation and storage resources to fully blend away the tastes, and keep honey piping hot from the moment that it is milked from the bee right until you get the pot home.

Thanks to the Food Standards Agency, all honey pots have to be properly labelled. Honey is almost pure sugar. Any bacterium unfortunate enough to land in it will probably die rapidly of osmotic pressure. As a result, honey can contain bacteria that are very dead, and the FSA thus mandates that all pots carry a best before date.

The warning label shown here is one that the FSA has forced a cowboy roadside honey vendor to employ. Notice the characteristic signs of a spiv operation that can be seen on this label: The pseudo-Old English lettering, so lacking in proper Heavy Metal Umlauts and properly crossed letter eths; the non-uniform hand-written text that has clearly never been anywhere near a computer font in its life; the excessive non-ASCII punctuation, when a full stop is all that is required; the three-bee "beeohazard" warning symbol at the top left; and the lack of a post code.

Labels for good quality honey are, of course, computer printed in all-uppercase ASCII with bar codes, several long strings of computer-generated letters and numbers, and the post code of the blending plant near Slough where the honey was boiled and blended. A machine-made label that is clearly untouched by human hand is your guide to good quality machine-made honey.

How honey is stored in the supermarket is also important. A good quality supermarket will place the honey pots on shelves located immediately below the brightest store lighting, or next to a warm air inlet vent for the building's heating system, to ensure that the pots are kept toasty warm and the honey is not allowed to cool below the optimum storage temperature of 60 degrees Celsius.