Laurence Edwards started Black Mountain Honey after a bee swarm landed in his Birmingham garden seven years ago. He now harvests honey into recyclable jars and sells four varieties, including a Great Taste 2-star soft-set. Every online order includes wildflower seeds that have collectively seeded eight acres of meadow.
I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. I own a Great Taste Award-winning honey company, and we're based in Nerquiss in North Wales. We started the business about 7 years ago. A swarm landed in my garden in Birmingham and took residence in a small tree, and then we put that swarm into a hive, and that's how the business started. The business has progressed and got bigger and bigger, and we've increased the number of bees that we've kept, and then we started selling our honey about 5 years ago, and then we've just expanded our product range from there. We We do have core standards that we uphold. The main one is really the honey that we produce comes straight out of the hive, we put it straight into jars. Everything's recyclable, all of our postal packaging is fully compostable. So yeah, we're not massive fans of plastic and we do everything we can to limit the amount of plastics that we use. We keep colonies of bees, they are effectively livestock. We keep them in beehives. The bees go out, they forage on flowers, they bring back nectar that's about 80% water. And then they fan that down into the hive to produce honey, bring it down to about 20% water. So it is as simple as that. Honey is just intensified flower nectar. All of our honey comes in these jars. So these are 8-ounce jars of honey. We try and limit the amount of work that goes into it. So a lot of other honey producers have all different sizes of jar and lots of different types of honey. We try and keep it as simple as possible. So we have 4 main types of honey. We have a runny honey, which is a Great Taste Award winner, won 1 star last year. We have a soft set honey, which is like a spreadable honey, and again, that's just foraged from natural wildflowers. That won 2 stars at the Great Taste Awards. And then we have a heather honey, which is foraged in Llandegla. And then we also sell a borage honey that we don't produce ourselves because you can't get borage honey in Wales. So we wanted, we wanted 4 to go into our gift packs because we sell a lot of gift packs. 4 fits in really nice. We love collaborations. We do it all the time, and we're constantly approaching people to do new collaborations because we think we've got a good product. And we love the social media promotion side of it as well. So we are in a huge amount of shops in Denbighshire and Flintshire. On our website we have a list of every single shop. Anybody who doesn't like honey, definitely give it a go, and anybody coming to North Wales, give Black Mountain Honey a try. For every order on our website at Black Mountain Honey, we give away a free pack of wildflower seeds to help save the bees. To date we've given away enough wildflower seeds to plant 8 Acres of wildflower meadow.
