Description: The honey you are buying today comes from one of Epping Forest Honey's local apiaries – they have 150 hives around the local area from Epping & Chigwell to Redbridge.
The honey bees will fly up three miles to get a particular nectar and this changes continuously through spring and summer. This honey is very pale and it will have a lot of borage (the purple fields you see) with a mild taste.
Sometimes bees collect forage with a lot of glucose and this will cause granulation where the honey will set. Other times there will be less glucose and more fructose and sucrose, where the honey will stay runny. It your honey granulates and you want it runny then simply pop it in a saucepan of just off the boil water for ten minutes, then repeat and your honey will be runny again. Please do not put in the microwave as that destroys all the goodness.
Epping Forest honey is very simply collected in the mid summer and spun on a centrifugal spinner before coarse filtering. This leaves in all the pollen, propolis and other goodness that large commercial suppliers remove to hide the origin and also make the honey jars uniform in colour and taste. Our honey is raw – it is never heated above the temperature that the bees keep the centre of the hive – around 36 degrees all year round. It is not pasteurised. It is the undamaged local pollen within the honey that some people find helps with hay-fever symptoms in the spring and summer. Most take a teaspoon a day in the weeks leading up to when they usually have problems.
A hive will have one queen who lasts about three years and between 10,000 and 60,000 female workers, depending on the time of the year. The workers will only last around six weeks during the summer and in the spring male bees are produced and make up 5/10% of the colony. They do no work around the hive and only have one job – to mate with a queen from another colony.
The bees normally produce three or four times as much honey as the colony actually need to get them through the winter. It is this excess that we extract and prepare for you.
Weight: 227g
Ingredients: Apricots, unrefined cane sugar, muscovado sugar & lemon juice.
Vegan Friendly: Yes
Allergy advice: In Bold. Our products are packed in a facility that handles products containing Gluten, Tree Nuts, Peanuts, Sesame, Mustard, Soybeans, Lupin, Sulphur Dioxide & Sulphites.
Country of Origin: Made in the UK
Packaging: Glass Jar - please reuse or refill.
Storage: Store away from daylight.