Our Philosophy
Our Philosophy
At Purely Bees, we believe in allowing bees to live and work as nature intended. By doing so, we believe that the honey produced by the bees is of the highest quality and taste, with maximum health benefits. This is because the bees are able to forage freely for nectar and pollen from a wide range of plants, up to several miles from the hives, leading to a diverse and nutritious honey.However, modern beekeeping practices often involve constant interference in the lives of the bees, such as manipulating the hives or the bees themselves, in order to increase productivity or protect against diseases, pests, and parasites.
In addition, modern beekeeping practices often involve processing the honey after it has been harvested. Techniques such as heating and extreme filtering are used to reduce production costs and create a more visually appealing product. However, these processes can strip the honey of its natural nutrients and flavor.
At Purely Bees, we reject these practices and instead choose to keep our bees and produce our honey in the most natural way possible. By doing so, we are able to preserve the health benefits and delicious taste of the honey, giving our customers the purest and most nutritious honey available.
Our very low carbon footprint!
Our honey is locally produced, processed and sold – in other words there is a very low carbon footprint. Most commercially produced honey is a blend of honeys from across the EU or even across the world.
Did You Know...?
Our bees, kept in a combination of standard bee hives and top bar hives, are allowed to live as nature intended – meaning that we open the hives as seldom as possible, and we don’t apply chemicals and pesticides to the bees as is common practice in the industry (That being said, we remain conscientious and monitor our bees for reportable and virulent diseases as required by law). We believe that our practice minimises the risk of noxious chemicals infiltrating the honey produced by the bees, and also maximises the harmony of our bees, as it is a recognised fact that opening beehives regularly for inspection stresses the bees – which we feel inevitably has some impact on the quality of the honey produced.
We always leave our bees with ample reserves of their own honey to survive through the winter – after all, that’s why they store up honey in the first place! Conventional beekeeping practices tend to favour removing as much honey as possible from the bees, and then feeding them sugar water to compensate – a poor substitute for the real thing ... We feel our practice ensures that our bees remain as healthy as possible and again must contribute to the quality of the honey they produce. Furthermore, there is always a risk that in feeding sugar water to bees, some of the “honey” produced from that could end up in the honey harvested for human consumption – which then is no longer pure natural honey!
We use the least disruptive methods possible to harvest our honey; fully “ripe” honeycomb sections are manually selected and gently crushed then coarse filtered without any heating of the honey (retaining much of the valuable pollen present in the honey). Conventional honey extraction techniques use centrifugal extractors to indiscriminately “fling” the honey out of the honeycomb at high speed, then heat the honey to allow it to be filtered rapidly through fine filters so that it looks “polished”. We believe our practices preserve the essential character of the honey by first of all only processing honey which is “ripe” (meaning that the bees have deemed it fit to preserve by covering the honeycomb cells with a layer of wax); secondly heating the honey is known to destroy valuable enzymes it contains; and thirdly filtering out most of the pollen removes one of the most beneficial constituents of the honey.
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Free collection of honey bee swarms in and around Bexhill
If a swarm of bees has landed in your garden or somewhere on your property (or maybe even on
your car!) don't panic, we can help. We will gladly come and collect swarms, free of charge
within a 10 mile radius of Bexhill-on-Sea, and give them a good home in one of our rural
apiaries in and around Bexhill.