Our First Jar of Honey Gets Sold

When I became a beekeeper several years ago, it was because the world of the Honey Bee fascinated me. I loved wildlife and the outdoors, I tended my own allotment and Honey was one of my favourite foods. So it was a no brainer to try my hand at keeping bees.

I never dreamt that I'd share my honey with anyone other than close friends and family but when I started getting enquiries from the friends of my friends, I realised that I couldn't give it all away for free!

Putting a price on my pride and joy, the honey, was much more difficult than I first anticipated. If I compared it to shop bought honey, which in some cases was as cheap as £1, I'd be doing my bees a huge disservice. Not to mention that these shop bought substances could hardly be considered honey! (See Honey Adulteration). However, If I priced each jar based on the beekeeping effort that was required for that very limited harvest of honey, I'd be pricing out most of the people I wanted to share it with!

The next obstacle was to order some jar labels. This initially sounded easy... Except I wanted my honey jars to be different to everyone else's. I wanted them to look original. So that ruled out the pre-printed 'Local' honey labels that you can pickup online.

In fact, most of the labels online completely obscured the honey within... I wanted our labels to be transparent so everyone could admire the beautiful golden amber colour. The only option was to get in a designer. Rob from Red Flag Manchester was fantastic and after a couple of meetings we'd settled on a shiny new logo and some fantastic jar artwork.

Three weeks later, after extracting, bottling and labelling, we had our first harvest ready to sell and our first customer through the door. I was incredibly nervous. Had we got the price right? Did the jars look professional? The answer was a resounding yes... she came in for three jars and left with nine!