We’re here to help get it straight from the hive direct to your door. But we also want to help you share their passion – help you get to know the producers and their bees, and learn all you need to know to truly enjoy one of nature’s most wonderful foods as a connoisseur. After selling my own honey with my daughter since 2009, we have teamed up with Harry to showcase honey from other like-minded i
ndependent producers and formed Benefers' Bees. As with wine, so much of the pleasure of honey is in knowing who produced it, where and how. We aim to bring you a huge variety of pure, unprocessed and unblended honey direct from the producer. And that's why we want to introduce you to the amazing people that dedicate themselves to keeping the bees and the art of honey production. They're not employees of some large honey business, they keep bees because they love keeping bees and they produce a honey that reflects this. There are an infinite variety of flavours, rich and local, reflecting the flora of their region and the seasons in which they are harvested. We want you to have as much information as possible about the honey we sell, because only then can you really appreciate its wonderful and unique characteristics. We believe that there are more and more people like us – that care about where, how and by whom their honey is made. Not only is this especially important with honey (see Honey Facts) but it just adds so much to the enjoyment of the product. So much honey is fake, adulterated with non-honey syrups and sugars and can even contain harmful and carcinogenic antibiotics. As a country we import 90% of all our honey and know so little about it. We consume the majority of it as adulterated and processed sugar syrup with no knowledge of where it comes from or how it is produced. Supermarket honey - "A blend of non-EU countries'...Yuk! We want to offer an alternative…. It isn’t just about the honey for us. It’s about the bees and the environment we live in. Bees are vital to the ecology of our island and our very own survival depends on them. Our pet projects are of course related to bees but also the plight of the vanishing hedgehog and trying to rid our green spaces of all the rubbish we seem so intent on ruining them with. We hope you share our enthusiasm for these important projects detailed in our 'other projects' section and buy in to our project! Our Background
Pete has been producing Benefers' Bees honey for 10 years. Pete’s first interest and love for bees actually began with a love for the bumble bee, (Bombus) that don't actually make honey, but are still his favorite genus to this very day. Fascinated by the interdependent nature of all living creatures and aware that bees of all kinds (of which there are up to 25,000 known species, with many more likely to be discovered) function as the sex organs of most plants and are therefore are critical to our survival, He took a course in bee keeping and was hooked! One hive soon became thirty. Pete is driven by an ethical approach to beekeeping and always leaves the bees with plenty of their own honey to make it through the winter, only taking the surplus product. Harry is a complete beginner to the world of bee-keeping but is a self-proclaimed connoisseur of honey (he eats a lot) and has a wide experience of internet based business that hopefully has helped deliver a website that does what it set out to do. We came together over a shared love of the outdoors, the natural world and, of course, honey. Over several pints of cider the idea formed of developing a community where there is a direct connection between the supplier and the consumer of honey. We hope that this is just the start. We intend to grow our community throughout the UK, bringing a wider range of producers, flavours and locations. Honey is the wine of food, the more you know about it the more you enjoy it. We hope you like it!
