Our Honey

Jar of honey with a wooden honey dipper.

Our pure Honey from Charles Butler Apiary

Our pure Hampshire honey has been produced by honey bees collecting nectar and pollen from wild flowers, lime trees, and summer fruits and flowers next to the pastoral home of Charles Butler, The Father of English Beekeepers, in Wootton St Lawrence, Basingstoke.  We like to think that Charles Butler’s bees shared the very same location!

In its simplest form, pure honey is gently filtered with nothing more added to the honey - no sweeteners, oils or flavours. So it free from any tampering, and being pure, contains natural goodness with antibacterial and anti-fungal properties. Enjoying our honey will help your body fight any infection and boost your immune systems.

More about our honey

Honey gets its flavour from nature as it comes from the pollen in local flowers from plants, bushes and trees that bees forage on.

There are many types of pure honey: blossom (spring), oil-seed rape (late spring), meadow / fruit (summer), bramble / hedgerow flowers (late summer), ivy (early autumn) etc.

Each of our Charles Butler seasonal honey will therefore be unique and will depend on the environment, local flowers, time of the year that our bees have foraged on.

How to buy our pure Charles Butler honey

A booth at a market displays jars of local pure honey for sale, with informational posters about the lifecycle of honeybees and bumblebees and wasps. A person stands beside the booth, and various bee-themed products and literature are on the table.

We will be attending shows and events during the season where you can taste the honey before you buy, as well as enjoy delicious samples of honey cake, honey health bars and honey breads. Recipes available too.

Our Recipes

Here is a selection of our downloadable recipes, each made with our own honey – enjoy!

Beware Adulterated Honey - Fake Honey

“Adulterated honey” is honey that has been mixed with some other substance; usually a similar but cheaper, sweetener like corn syrup or sugar. While fake honey may look like pure honey, the key difference is that is made in a factory rather than by nature.

Fake honey also:

  • contains a mix of bee honey and cheaper cane or other syrups

  • often has a high composition of water diluting the honey

  • has added artificial or synthetic ingredients such as dyes and flavour enhancers

  • sourced from multiple countries on the label

  • has been pasteurised and heated to a high temperature - a process which destroys the natural properties of the honey.