The main dish

The main dish

Regent’s Park Honey

Regent’s Park Honey

Toby Mason started keeping bees in Regent’s Park after completing a course run by the North London Beekeepers Association and, having decided that working outside was preferable to the office job, he set up his Pure Food label and started marketing his wonderfully complex and delicious honey.

Toby’s bees are sired by queens flown in from New Zealand that have a reputation for being calm and gentle which makes them ideal for life in Regent’s Park.  The worker bees have an amazing variety of flowers and trees from which to collect their nectar and there is always something delicious on the menu year round.  This amazing diversity gives the resulting honey a wonderful variation in taste, colour and texture throughout the season as the bees feed on all the different plants.  The park also benefits from the bees presence as they carry pollen on their legs whilst they are collecting their nectar thus ensuring that flowering plants are able to reproduce.

A working day for the beekeeper changes with the seasons.  Early in spring when the colonies are growing in size Toby checks through each hive once a week, making sure the bees look healthy and are not about to swarm.  A hive can only have one queen at a time, so if the bees are creating a new queen from one of the worker eggs that’s a sign they are getting itchy feet and the colony is about to divide.  If they do swarm he will get a phone call from the park officers to collect a bunch of bees, usually from a high tree!  As the season progresses and the hives fill up with honey, Toby takes the frames full of honeycomb off the hive for extraction.  The frames are spun round in a large stainless steel cylinder and the honey is collected on the bottom.  It is filtered twice through organic muslin cloth and then bottled into glass jars.  The honey is not heated or altered in any other way as this would reduce the complexity of the flavour.

Harbour & Jones has been lucky enough to adopt two of Toby’s hives, with plans to adopt more next year and we will also be taking chefs and managers to visit the bees as part of our drive to connect our teams and suppliers.  Toby has supplied us with honey for our hospitality sites this year and we will be serving it at St Paul’s Cathedral from January 2009 when we take over.  Next year we are hoping that the bees work extra hard so that we can have enough honey for all our units to use.

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