Pots of gold - best honey in London

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10 April 2012

In front of me were 14 jars of pure pleasure with colours ranging from the palest straw to deep amber. You could imagine it almost as an art installation: the areas of London represented through their honey. Samples had been garnered from deepest Peckham, high on Hampstead Heath, from the rooftops of the Royal Festival Hall and both Tates.

I imagined the park beds of lupins, window boxes of geraniums, borders of lavender all over the capital which have been providing bees with vital nectar and pollen. In the countryside you get honey which comes from one particular flower — such as heather honey from the Yorkshire moors. I have tasted lovely wild thyme honey in Greece and some gathered from lemon blossom in Italy, but London honey is special because it comes from a huge variety of flowers in gardens all over the city. What's more, unlike in the countryside, there are few pesticides — London honey is very pure.

Beekeeping has become incredibly popular in the capital. In the centre of London alone there are 180 beekeepers. The north London group has closed its doors to new members until 2011 as they don't have the resources to mentor more novices. The publicity about the threat to the honey bee has stirred lots of people, myself included, to take up this absorbing hobby and recent reports claim the urban beekeeping boom is reversing any decline in the wider bee population.

But not everyone is happy about that. John Chapple, president of the London Beekeepers' Association, who keeps four hives at Buckingham Palace, told me this week that there simply aren't enough flowers in London to sustain any more colonies of bees.

Nevertheless Capital Bee has just been set up, a campaign supported by the Mayor which promotes community beekeeping in London. In December it will hold its first summit, with talks on the issues facing bees, and the economic and environmental benefits of community beekeeping in the city.

Chapple has been told by the charity behind Capital Bee, Sustain, that Boris Johnson plans to fund 50 more hives on community food-growing spaces around the capital. Chapple calls this an "ill-thought-out idea", just as he also does not support the beekeeper training part of the Co-op's £500,000 Plan Bee project launched in 2009, which also funds bee research and encourages the planting of bee-friendly wildflowers. Plan Bee has so far put 24 London candidates through its training programme. A further 20 have taken a beekeeping taster course and the classroom sessions have been oversubscribed.

"It's out of touch with what's needed," says Chapple. "People need to grow plants and look after what bees really need. It's the in-thing to throw money at beekeeping but too many people are jumping on the bandwagon."

Indeed, recent figures from the British Beekeepers' Association (BBKA) show a 50 per cent increase in the number of UK bee colonies in the past six months, with 3.5 million pounds of honey harvested this summer by amateur beekeepers and the highest yields in the South-East.

But while for some this may look like too many hives, according to the BBKA this year's honey production is worth £200 million to the agricultural economy due to the value of commercial crops that benefit from bee pollination. And, according to Capital Bee, since most of the crops that we rely on for food supplies are bee-pollinated, an effort to increase the bee population is essential to secure global food supplies.

For Chapple, the key in London is that park keepers avoid hybrid plants which are no good for bees and return to more traditional borders.
I was interested to hear his advice on how to judge different kinds of honey: the key qualities for a technical honey judge are aroma, viscosity and clarity. Being more of an amateur, I decided to concentrate purely on flavour.

For me, this tasting was a bittersweet experience. For the first time since I began keeping honey seven years ago I was unable to harvest any honey myself this summer. Last year I had two thriving colonies but both came a cropper.

The first hive was robbed by wasps in search of food late in the season after most of the fruit had gone. They killed all the bees. The second hive seemed to be thriving. On bright winter days I would watch the bees flying around and so assumed all was well. But when we opened the hive in spring, there was no brood — eggs — which meant my queen had gone.

I made several panicky phone calls to see if I could buy a new queen but it was too early in the season for an English one. After much research I managed to track down an imported queen which was an Italian-New Zealand cross. She arrived by post in a little yellow cage surrounded by attendant bees. The entrance was barred by a block of sugar which my bees ate their way through and so learned to get used to the scent of the new queen.

I don't know whether it's the Italian or the New Zealand genes but she's been a delight, laying the most mild-mannered bees you can imagine.
There is an adage in beekeeping: in the first year you get either bees or honey, so I decided to let them keep all the stores for themselves to get through the winter. By next summer let's hope my bees are buzzing with the sweet smell of success.

The British Beekeepers' Association is running a scheme called adoptahive.com — there's absolutely no risk of being stung!

Sticky and sweet: Martha's guide to the tastiest honey in town

My own stores are running dangerously low so I was delighted when the Standard asked me to taste a variety of London honeys. I began with the great institutions that have hives on their roofs.

The Royal Festival Hall hive is shaped like its building and I enjoyed the rich flavour of its honey (3/5). Tate Modern's jar (4/5) was superior to that of its sister, Tate Britain (2/5), which was bland, unlike the contents of its often controversial gallery.

Next, the city's green spaces. The honey from Regent's Park had a strange aroma — cat's wee — but the taste was pleasant, with a touch of lilac (3/5). An expert said there could have been ivy flowers around: these have a bitter smell, which mellows over time. English Wildflower Honey from Hampstead Heath was darker than many and had an interesting, almost maple syrup flavour (4/5).

From south of the Thames I tried Wandsworth Floral Honey, which was disappointing, with a straightforward taste (2/5). However I really enjoyed the Kennington jar, which smelt and tasted of jasmine flowers, beautifully fresh (4/5). And Walworth Garden Farm (4/5), too, had an intriguing blend of flavours.

North of the river, Tufnell Park honey had a touch of fudge (3/5). The jar from King's Cross luckily lacked any whiff of canal and had its own distinctive flavour (4/5).

Those that failed to inspire were Fortnums, Nunhead and Wimbledon (2/5).

My favourite came as a surprise. It was from Peckham, with a wonderful creamy flavour, almost like Scottish tablet/toffee, with subtle underlying scents of different flowers. Could there be a secret wildflower meadow in Peckham? Produced by the Kairos Community Trust, the honey is not on sale yet but is made by a project that helps people suffering with drug and alcohol addiction (5/5).

Pots of gold - best honey in London

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