I may be interested in buying some buckets of honey. I have some local customers that only want local honey, but my postal customers just want good honey, so they wont mind.
I am still harvesting, and want to clear my stock first. But may be interested in a few weeks. Back in the spring I was desperate for some as I dd not have enough to go around.
WoodenBeam - £5 per is just a bit too much for me right now, unfortunately I dot sell for £10 per lb - yet..... If you were just down the road back in the spring, it may have been a different story.
But £3-3.5 is definitely a price point I could work with, I would consider a road trip to collect a few buckets. I would potentially pay more for anything special like black, heather etc.. So please anyone PM me if you have a bountiful harvest and want to sell me some.
I would like to see an ethos of beekeepers giving first refusal of their excess honey to other keepers.
I love people coming to my door to buy honey, having a chat and meeting new people. But I get it for some people that's a bother. I get it that selling honey takes effort, and for some of you its just easier to bang it out cheap and get on with enjoying your day. I understand that some of you like to keep your honey local so are happy to sell it to a shop round the corner. So I dont realy think you need a slap, but do think you deserve more for your honey. But keepers underselling honey is often a symptom of a problem, so are by no means solely to blame for honey being undervalued.
Honey has a public perception problem in the UK that is tied to the abundance of low quality food as previously mentioned. People who know little about honey just perceive it as some gue to put on toast and in their mind its worth the same as jam. And that's not helped by c£&p like this:
https://groceries.asda.com/product/honey/asda-pure-clear-honey/33195
Seriously £95p per lb inc jar! We use this exact honey at my work (not for human consummation I should add). So for years this was the only honey I saw. And it was not until I got bees and tasted real honey I released how bad the Asda c£&p is. I am convinced its adulterated. It smells closer to golden syrup and had a very weak honey taste.
Look at how people view lobster, Oysters or Caviar. All once considered a poor mans dish, but now command the respect that honey deserves.
You really have to give the Newzealand Government a pat on the back for their marketing of Manuka honey. Transforming it from fodder (yes, excess was fed to animals) to "premium" honey.
I have seen documentarys about the efforts to spot fake honey and the "arms race". But I think the efforts to detect fake honey are pitiful. As is our governments efforts to promote UK honey. Way back when I was at school, we were shown the food pie chart with meet fish, dairy, veg etc. Our government recommended those proportions of food to be consumed, not based on nutrition, but on UK production. But there was never any honey on the chart. You hear about our government promoting cheese, Cornish pasties or pork pies. But the government had never cared about the bee keeping industry or considered it to be an important food resource.
Look at the horse meat scandal. OMG, some meat, with another kind of meat in it! Well the same thing goes on week in week out with honey.
Fortunately I do think there is a growing perception that honey is a luxury grade product, largely thanks to a wave of new age online health guru types. So there is hope of honey one day getting the perception it deserves.