We are artisan beekeepers that produce top quality English honey that is undiluted, unadulterated and not altered in any way. Our honey is the authentic taste of pure honey. It’s the Real Deal!!

Our Beginning

Loughborough Honey was founded in 2006 as a Father/Daughter partnership. From the outset it has been our intention to produce a premium quality mixed-flower honey. We realised that few people had ever tasted pure honey as it is a very common practice to dilute honey with sugar-syrup and/or water.

We intiated our business with one hive and took years to learn our trade. Rearing bees for honey production (as opposed to a hobby) is a complex and demanding proposition if it is to be done properly. The bee lifecycle is fairly alien to that of a mammal or bird and a good deal of skill is needed to persuade them to stay in our hives. They are wild ainmals and if they do not like the accommodation, they will decamp for (literally) pastures greener. We therefore build all our own hives to ensure a quality environment for our bees.

Pure honey has an intense flavour with a clean lingering after-taste. When you have tasted it, if you close your eyes and breath out through your nose, you can smell the flowers. It is an intense and up-lifting sensation experienced only by those discerning people that differentiate between artisan-produced pure honey and lesser products - often imported from the far East that is diluted/adulterated with cheaper non-bee products. Such products are often sold at retail prices below the cost of production of English honey.

Beekeeping vs Bee Farming

Beekeeping is surprsingly popular. However - less than 20% of people that acquire a hive and a colony of bees continue after the first year. Of those that persist, few venture to enter the undertaking with more than two or three hives in a fixed location. A full-blooded commercial undertaking may have hundreds of hives in multiple locations. Bees have foraging radius of circa three miles and forty or so hives can deplete/exhaust the nectar availability within that radius. It would therefore be counter-productive to have apiaries with this number of hives within six miles of each other. There is therefore a large gap between an established commercial enterprise and a hobby beekeeper. This is reflected in the professional associations for bee-husbandry. The British Bee Keepers Association represents the non-commercial beekeepers and the British Bee Farmers Association is the professional association that supports the honey production industry.

We have 16 hives (at the time of writing) and although we are members of the BBKA we may shortly seek additional membership of the BBFA. As our hive-count grows we sit somewhere in-between the two arbitrariy defined undertakings. We have yet to determine how large we would like our business to grow. It is our business ethos to produce the best quality honey that is comensurate with kindness to the bees, healthy for them, and is commercially viable. If increasing size would threaten any of these criteria we will deliberately limit our growth.

Thus far growth in hive numbers has been rapid. Demand for quality honey appears functionally limitless, as more and more people are recognising that supermarket honey leaves a lot to be desired in taste and provenance. Our ambition therefore is to satisfy customer demand (which seems to grow with our capacity to produce) without compromise to our mission statement set out above.

If you would like to try the outcome of our efforts, our honey is aviable in our shop on the above link. Be warned!! This will spoil you for cheap honey forever. When you become familiar with the real-deal, you will not want in the future to settle for a lesser but cheaper product.

We may romanticise the bees, but they remain wild animals and if they are made unhappy they can be aggressive. Bee stings are part of the life of a beekeeper.