It started with one hive and got out of hand.

Most beekeepers will tell you the same thing: nobody sets out to start a honey business. You get one hive because you are curious. Then you discover that a healthy colony in a good year makes a genuinely absurd amount of honey, and that you have run out of people to give it to.

That is roughly how this happened. One hive became three, three became more, and the bottles stopped fitting in the kitchen. Opening a shop was less a business plan than a storage solution.

Why we do not filter it

Commercial honey is heated and pushed through fine filters. It looks flawless, pours forever and never sets. It has also had the pollen, the trace wax and most of the character taken out of it.

We do neither. Our honey is strained through mesh coarse enough to catch bits of wax and nothing else, and it never goes above hive temperature. It will crystallize on your shelf eventually, and the color will not match the last bottle you bought. Both of those are the point.

The mercantile half

The shop filled up faster than expected. Once there was a counter, other makers started asking whether there was room — a potter here, someone making soap there. There was room.

There are now more than a dozen local and regional makers on the shelves. We would rather sell six things made by people we know than sixty things from a wholesale catalogue. Meet some of them here.

On prices

We set prices so that people here can afford them. That is not a marketing position — it comes from having been the person doing sums at the till, and remembering it clearly.

It is also why the shop ends up running the odd collection for the local high school. Times are hard for a lot of families in this county. If a honey shop can take one thing off someone's list, it should.