Gareth and Louise Trehearn, Founders of Manchester Honey Company, are giving away two jars of their delicious Manchester honey for for Yom Tov.
After being inundated with orders last Rosh Hashanah, Gareth and Louise Trehearn of the Manchester Honey Company knew they had to do something special this year. And so, they’re introducing a limited edition 3kg bulk honey offering! Don’t need quite that much? No problem – they’re also giving away two jars of their finest Manchester honey.
Louise shares the unexpected journey that led to the business’s creation: “Gareth did a course on beekeeping back in 2017 and it was just a hobby of his. We also have a cleaning business, but during lockdown we obviously weren’t allowed inside people’s houses, so Gareth advertised on Facebook that he’d collect swarms because farmers were allowed out at the time. That year, we went from four to 54 hives – it was a lot! Things really started to rocket when a video of us collecting a swarm of bees off a traffic light in Manchester went viral.”
While it is a business, the wellbeing of the bees comes first at the Manchester Honey Company: “For us, it’s always been about the bees. We do things differently from a lot of beekeepers as we don’t feed our bees sugar; most will take off all the honey and leave them sugar or a man-made sugar solution to survive over the winter. This does mean that we get smaller crops because we leave the honey for the bees but it’s the best thing for them and it means our honey is of the highest quality.”
At the core of the business is a commitment to sustainable beekeeping: “There’s a mite called varroa which decreases the life cycle of bees – it wiped out the UK’s bee population in the 1990s! It gets treated with miticides – similar to pesticides – but there are some bees that can genetically cope with varroa and live alongside it without it harming them. We breed bees that can do this, so we don’t have to pump chemicals into the hive and potentially harm them.”
“Nine out of 10 supermarket honey are adulterated – honey is the third most adulterated food in the world after milk and olive oil.” Louise explains the importance of keeping it local when buying your honey. “Supermarkets are getting loads of different honeys from around the world and blending them together to make what you see on the shelves. Sometimes they’ll add a whole host of other things such as rice syrups as a way of cutting costs.
“A jar bought in London should not taste the same as one bought in Edinburgh, but most supermarket honeys will taste exactly the same, no matter where they’re bought. We sell our products by the postcode from our apiaries across the city; our Altrincham honey tastes quite different from our Sale honey. Less than 10% of honey bought in the UK is made here – which is madness!”
Gareth and Louise are giving one lucky reader the chance to win two jars of its Manchester blend which is made using honey from all seven of its apiaries. Wherever you live in Manchester, there’s a bit of your area in every jar!
