Heather in flower across open moorland under a heavy sky.

Thurlbeck · Somerset · twelve apiaries

Honey off one moor, sold as what it is.

Bees on the heather above Thurlbeck and in the valleys under it. Extracted in our own honey house, jarred apiary by apiary — nothing blended across sites, nothing warmed past 40 °C.

500 g raw ling heather honey

£11 case of six £58

Order honey 0117 496 0271

UK post £4.80 a box · collection free

A cell is sealed when the honey in it is ready, not when it is full.

Nectar arrives at about seven parts water in ten. The colony fans it down, and at 18 % water — not before — the bees lay a wax capping over the cell and it is finished. Fanning is not even across a frame: the air moves best along the top bar and down the middle of the face and worst in the bottom corners. So the sealing does not sweep, it spreads, and it spreads along the shape of the airflow.

Read down the page and the frame ripens. 629 cells, each deciding for itself.

A frame of comb at the end of ripening: 629 of 629 cells sealed under wax cappings.

Drawn comb with nothing in it: 223 cells, none sealed. — A frame in a dearth

Same comb, same bees, nothing coming in. There is nothing to ripen, so there is nothing to seal — 0 of 223 cells, all season.

Comb filled to the meniscus and left open: 223 cells standing at 22 % water, none sealed. — A frame in a wet week

A flow on, but the air is saturated and the water content stops at 22 %. Every cell fills — 223 of them — and not one is sealed. That honey has to come off late or it ferments.

This season, ten honeys

Priced by the jar and by the case of six. Every one is a single apiary and a single flow — the label carries the site and the week it came off.

Forest honeydew 140 mm · Dark amber 340 g £12 case of six £65 Ling heather 114 mm · Amber 500 g £11 case of six £58 Ivy 96 mm · Amber 340 g £8 case of six £43 Cut comb 90 mm · Amber 220 g box £8.50 case of six £45 Bramble 68 mm · Light amber 454 g £9.50 case of six £51 Wildflower 45 mm · Extra light amber 454 g £8.50 case of six £45 Lime 34 mm · White 454 g £9 case of six £48 White clover 25 mm · White 340 g £7.50 case of six £40 Spring blossom 18 mm · White 340 g £7.50 case of six £40 Oilseed rape 8 mm · Water white 340 g £6.50 case of six £35

The swatch beside each name is not a decorative colour. It is that honey's Pfund grade — the millimetre reading a colour grader gives it — and it is the same number the photograph beside that honey is printed through.

Order honey The full list, with what each one is like

Jars of honey on wooden shelves, each a different colour. — Last season, jarred and waiting on labels.

Honey running out of a stainless extractor through a strainer. — Coming off the extractor through a coarse strainer. It settles for four days before it is jarred; nothing is filtered fine enough to take the pollen out.

Every photograph here is printed through the honey it is about

Honey is graded for colour on the Pfund scale: the depth, in millimetres, of a standard amber glass wedge that matches the sample. A depth of coloured medium is a filter, so each picture on this site is passed through that honey's own transmittance at its own depth — the heather at 114 mm, the rape at 8 mm.

It is baked into the files, not laid over them in the browser: there is no CSS filter on any image anywhere on this site. The empty comb further up is the one plate with no honey behind it, so its depth is 0 mm and it comes out of the grade untouched.

0 mm Water white Empty comb
8 mm Water white Oilseed rape
17 mm Extra white
25 mm White White clover
34 mm White Lime
45 mm Extra light amber Wildflower
50 mm Extra light amber
68 mm Light amber Bramble
85 mm Light amber The honey house
96 mm Amber Ivy
114 mm Amber Ling heather
140 mm Dark amber Forest honeydew

Water white at one end, dark amber at the other, and the reading is a depth in millimetres because the instrument is a wedge of amber glass you match the sample against. Twelve of these depths are in use on this site.

Where the hives stand

Twelve apiaries, 124 colonies, all of them inside eleven miles of the honey house. Three of them below; the rest are on the apiaries page.

Keld Top

24 colonies · 412 m, open moor above the spring line

Ling heather, bell heather, bilberry

A single hive on a stand in a forest clearing.

Bracklow Plantation

12 colonies · 190 m, a clearing inside mixed conifer

Larch and spruce honeydew, willowherb, bramble

Hives stood out along the headland of a field in flower.

Low Leys

40 colonies · 78 m, arable headlands east of the ridge

Oilseed rape, then clover on the leys

All twelve apiaries and what is on the forage

A beekeeper lifting a frame of bees clear of the brood box.

Hives for growers

Colonies on your blossom for the flowering window, sited by us and inspected weekly. Top-bar counts and a written record of every visit; we take them home when you say the flow is over.