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10 facts about honey that every foodie should know

Excellent honey is one of the greatest pleasures in life - but despite it being so adored by Brits, there's still so much for avid foodies to discover about the good stuff. Here, Emily Abbott, founder of Hive & Keeper, shares need-to-know intel for every honey lover

Nov 04, 2025 | 5 minutes to read | Great British Food Awards

There are over a million visits to flowers in a single 224g jar of honey.

In a bee’s lifetime it makes just a 17th of a teaspoon of honey.

Bees will fly for 3 miles to forage for pollen and nectar, and what they collect depends on what their hive needs at that particular moment in time.

Nectar is about 90% water, which is why it needs to rain for a good honey crop – but not too much if the flowers are to stay undamaged and the bees able to fly.

Honey is made up of slow release sugars like glucose and fructose and complex sugars which are prebiotics and feed our gut-bacteria.

We have 3,000 taste buds and they all fire up when you taste honey – hold your nose, roll the honey around your mouth and then let go and experience the full complex aroma of raw honey.

Some honeys are sweeter and lighter, perfect for sweetening drinks or baking, others are more warming and traditional perfect on toast, and others have a more complex flavour profile which would liven up any breakfast porridge or yoghurt!

Honey will always crystalise, it’s the glucose in it knitting around the pollen grains. How a honey crystalises depends on the balance of natural sugars in it. It’s a good sign of a raw honey

Most supermarket honeys are blends from all over the world (including China) to make sure the taste is always the same – even honeys from a single area in the UK will combine honeys from different hives and places.

Hive & Keeper’s honeys are different – they are numbered small batch raw honeys from a specific apiary, and a single point in time. The beekeeper took the honey off one day and then it’s jarred – that’s it. It means that every Hive & Keeper honey keeps the natural characteristics that all the visits to flowers, the weather and what the bees needed at that point in time have created.

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Great British Food Awards

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