The Honey Shop

So let's have a little chat with James and see what he's up to. So James, tell us a little bit about your background. I understand you've been a honey farmer for quite a long time. For many, many years. I come from a t And yeah, we've had bee I've now taken up beekeeping here in the UK. We've been here for 20, 25 years going strong here and we've got a shop now called the Okay, so tell us a little bit about what makes the No, no. We'really a very tiny artisan shop. What you'll find here is probably is most certainly the best of the best. One of our ethos, one of our policies is to bring to people the quality of the honey that should be there and not to over process it, not to glamorize it into some kind of visual product. Really, when we take it off the bee So we do it all by hand. There's no pasteurizing of the honey. We don't heat treat when we extract it. We do it by hand. We use a little centrifugal force w Now that'somet Can you tell us a little bit about why are they pasteurizing it? Well I guess when we say pasteurized we just mean intense heat treating of it. So yes, that's what they'll do. They do that because most honeys are going to want to naturally set. They're going to want to naturally crystallize. There's natural crystals in honey and what will happen is that honey will either start to kind of go really rock hard or it might go half runny, half sad, it might even stay a little bit runny. But supermarkets want it all to look absolutely uniform and the way to control that is to super heat it and I can't remember the temperature, it's well above 50 Celsius. A bee So if you really want to be sort of a puritan about t Yeah because my understanding is that those kind of Absolutely, yeah honey will never generally go off and it's good for topically to kill germs and bacteria and to cleanse wounds and the idea be You're absolutely right when you start super heating honey that kills that off so t It has to be raw honey. I t So James if we can just have a little wonder over here and let's have a look at some of these honeys that you've got and why are they looking different? I mean I'm looking at t It's just allowing the honey to do exactly what it wants to naturally do in the jar. So in that case, I mean here's, come t I mean here these honeys are starting to do what they want to do. Here we've got slightly crystallization starting okay but from our point of view you're going to eat t Here you've got it slightly set and honey's, live honeys will start to ebb and flow throughout the season. You'll find that maybe as the room kind of gets a little bit warmer t So the difference between A lot of people associate that's another big no-no. There's never any, we don't, it's illegal to adulterate or add anyt In other countries there's a practice where they will add sugar but t So we just want to really ensure that t So that was really good. I loved seeing that because I was campaigning for years because I knew it worked as a solve for both burns and for leg ulcers and wounds. But it took years for it to finally, for scientists to kind of research it and finally come to the point where they accepted that this is, But for that to be actually applicable it has to be the raw honey. You can't have a shot bought pasteurized overheated honey. Absolutely. Because one of the t It kills its natural hydrogen peroxide levels. So you're absolutely right. If you were to, I'd be very careful putting it topically on a wound if it was just That stuff is fine for cooking but I wouldn't really want to use it for health reasons. Do . . Well, But again, honey, I don't know how it neutralizes it. It neutralizes the enzymes or somet That's obviously helps. As a rule, we're finding the darker honeys and I don't know why. I t So maybe use a key rule if you're looking specifically for something Go for a slightly darker honey. And just to wind up, can you. . . Oh, actually, can you tell us a little bit about who your honey producers are because it's not these mixed-flow honeys that come off these massive farms and you get So who are your producers and what kind of quantities are we talking about? Again, we started one of the first fair trade systems here in the UK. We hear a lot about fair trade to t But really, what we want to do is provide beekeepers here in the UK with a means to bring their honeys to market. So we'll test them. We'll make sure that they're proper and the best of the best. But we've been supporting beekeepers all around. So we have some of the honeys are supplied to us from little hobbyist beekeepers. They might come in with two buckets of honey. We'll have 60 buckets of t It helps to pay for the beekeeper's hobby and keeps it going. Some of them. . . I'll bring you over here. T . . Oh, God, it's about the 1950s. Because again, pollen, if you've got a natural allergy to pollen, it's because you're inhaling airborne pollen and it upsets your respiratory system. We're getting a lot of people as a knock on effect then that gives them asthma. But how often are people actually eating pollen, specific pollens that are in the UK? So we're getting a lot of people who either later in life are getting almost a toxicity to pollen because they're inhaling it or we get people from abroad moving to Britain never having British pollens ever in contact with. And of course they come down with the symptoms of hay fever. So what we've got is we've got special traps on our bee We're then taking the honey and we're doing it as raw as possible. We do a very minimal amount of filtering with it. We don't heat treat it and then we mix t And that has been so successful for people who have been suffering from hay fever. We get loads and loads of people coming back to us and the reports have been just fantastic. Now you don't just sell honey here. You sell everyt So can you tell us a little bit about what else is available here other than just honey? Well we sell all the protective clothes so you can start up your own beekeeping. We sell the bee Okay, so look at t We've got a bee T Yeah, that's got the bee So again we're supporting beekeepers. We've got a whole variety of little t We've got the smokers, the gloves. So you can pretty much come in here and you can get yourself set up. We actually breed bees as well. We do a special breed of bee called the buckfast bee from a beautiful He developed a special strain of bee specifically for the British Isles. And that bee we are now carrying on that pedigree. And do you also teach people about beekeeping? We do. We do beekeeping courses. We do weekend courses starting in April. It's a two day course. You do a practical Saturday and then you do a theoretical Saturday and then a practical Sunday. And under supervision we then let everybody open up a bee It's really a good foundation for taking up beekeeping in the future. Okay, so we've got a few seconds left of the video. I just want to show a few t So you can come here and have a little test of all sorts of there'some really wonderful honeys. There's international selection. There was one here that I was really particularly taken in by. This is honey with r And then there's mead we've got over here. And it's got pollen and royal jelly and propolis. And it's got So we're running out of time. Just one last t How can people get hold of you? Just give us a, go to our website www. the co. uk or telephone us on 0207 924 6233. Okay, thank you ever so much.