Our honey and beekeeping
At Buzz & Bloom, we produce 100% pure, raw and unfiltered honey from our own hives located across North Yorkshire and the Tees Valley.
Our bees are based on farms and rural sites in Thornton-le-Moor, in the hills near Wilton, and close to the River Tees near Darlington. These locations provide access to a rich variety of forage throughout the season, allowing our bees to produce distinctive local honey that reflects the changing landscape around them.
Beekeeping is a year-round commitment, but the busiest period begins in early spring. As soon as temperatures rise and the weather improves, our bees start foraging for nectar and pollen. We regularly visit each hive to check on the health of our colonies and monitor honey stores.
Many of our hive locations are chosen for their proximity to crops and wildflowers that are attractive to honey bees. During spring and early summer, our bees tend to forage on oilseed rape, fields of borage and a wide range of flowering plants and hedgerows found across Yorkshire countryside. The result is a delicious local honey.
Spring and summer are especially busy times for us. As nectar flows increase, we add extra honey supers (boxes that stack on top) to the hives, giving the bees additional space to store their surplus honey. Throughout the season we carefully monitor the colonies and carry out regular honey extraction and jarring to ensure the honey reaches our customers at its best.
One of the highlights of the beekeeping year is the annual move to the North Yorkshire moors. In August, many of our hives are driven up to areas of flowering heather, where the bees collect nectar from the iconic purple plants that cover the hillsides. Heather honey is highly prized for its rich flavour and distinctive texture. Once the heather flowering season comes to an end, we collect the hives in September and begin the extraction process. Heather honey is considered a premium honey due to its limited availability and unique characteristics and harvests are generally smaller than those from spring or summer honey, while its distinctive jelly-like consistency, known as thixotropy, makes extraction significantly more difficult and time-consuming. The result is a rich, aromatic honey that is highly prized by honey enthusiasts.
Honey harvesting is very much a family effort. During extraction season, family members and friends often help with uncapping frames, extracting honey, jarring and labelling. Over recent years we have invested in professional equipment to improve efficiency while ensuring every jar receives the same level of care that's at the heart of our beekeeping.
We believe honey should be as natural as possible. That's why our honey is never pasteurised or blended. It is simply extracted from the hive, filtered to remove natural wax particles and then jarred, preserving the flavour and aroma that make local honey so special.
Whether you're looking for spring blossom honey, summer flower honey or Yorkshire heather honey, every jar of Buzz & Bloom honey comes directly from our own hives and reflects the landscapes and seasons of North Yorkshire.
Looking for raw local honey from North Yorkshire? Browse our honey products or contact us to find out what's currently available.
