It was National Honey Week last week, 7th-12th May, and we teamed up again with our local suppliers, Liz and Mike, from Denholme Gate Honey, to put on a host of interactive activities for all ages. There were free samples of Denholme Gate’s delicious honey varieties on our Tasting Table, through to Mike coming in his beekeeper’s suit with his honey bees in tow - safely in their beehive of course! Liz then joined us on Saturday where we invited customers to bottle their own honey.
National Honey Week is a great opportunity to celebrate all that is great about honey and the wonderful honey bee, and Liz and Mike have a great story to tell. They are a husband and wife team, operating locally from their home in Denholme Gate, Bradford. They’re really passionate about honey, and have been successfully running Denholme Gate Honey since 1995. Their apiary produces some of the best honey in the county, with a wide variety of different flavours using pollen collected from wild flowers of willow herb and clover; and trees like sycamore, lime and hawthorne.
They have a strong ethos about the preservation and protection of the Honey Bee, of which there is only one species, that plays a vital part in the UK eco-system. Honey from Denholme honey is local, pure, natural, healthy and has strong medicinal and antibacterial properties – just as nature intended with no added chemicals or water.
Bake with it, drink with it or spread it – honey is a fantastic and versatile food and is packed with nutritional benefits. Honey can be used in a range of recipes; and we use it widely in some of our best-loved products from our Honey and ginger pork sausage, to our Honey Roast Ham. It’s the perfect partner for roasted carrots or parsnips, baked in the oven and drizzled all over them!
Here’s some more key facts about Honey:
- Honey is naturally sterile. Denholme Gate’s Honey has the same antibacterial properties as the famous Manuka Honey, but at a fraction of the price!
- Having a spoonful of local honey every day may help to keep hayfever at bay! Try Denholme Gate’s Honey with Pollen to help build up your defences against hayfever
- One honey bee would have to fly around the world twice, just to make one jar of honey
- Honey bees are hard little workers; they visit up to 100 flowers during one nectar collection trip, and they never sleep!
- The Queen bee lives for up to 5 years and lays around 1,500 eggs per day
- Worker bees live for just 6 weeks and produce around a thimble full of honey in their lifetime
- Warm weather is the best for bees – honey production is all dependent on a good climate
- The hexagon shape of the honeycomb is the strongest shape on the planet – it starts off as a circle and the worker bees nibble it into perfect hexagon shapes
- Wax is produced in the bees’ body from proteins in the nectar from plants
- Honey was found in Tutankhamen’s Tomb – it was 4,500 years old and still edible!
- Different types of nectar give honey a different consistency: darker runny honey is from trees such as the sycamore and hawthorne; medium coloured honey is from flowers such as clover, blackberry and willow; very light runny honey is from the Himalayan water balsam and is very floral in taste
- Yellow flowers such as oil seed rape make Spring honey
- Drinking cider vinegar and honey with hot water gives you great looking skin!
Liz & Mike with their delicious Honey
