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10 facts about honey that every foodie should know

Excellent honey is one of the greatest pleasures in life - but despite it being so adored by Brits, there's still so much for avid foodies to discover about the good stuff. Here, Emily Abbott, founder of Hive & Keeper, shares need-to-know intel for every honey lover 

Nov 04, 2025 | 5 minutes to read | Great British Food Awards
  • There are over a million visits to flowers in a single 224g jar of honey.
  • In a bee’s lifetime it makes just a 17th of a teaspoon of honey.
  • Bees will fly for 3 miles to forage for pollen and nectar, and what they collect depends on what their hive needs at that particular moment in time.
  • Nectar is about 90% water, which is why it needs to rain for a good honey crop – but not too much if the flowers are to stay undamaged and the bees able to fly.
  • Honey is made up of slow release sugars like glucose and fructose and complex sugars which are prebiotics and feed our gut-bacteria.
  • We have 3,000 taste buds and they all fire up when you taste honey – hold your nose, roll the honey around your mouth and then let go and experience the full complex aroma of raw honey.
  • Some honeys are sweeter and lighter, perfect for sweetening drinks or baking, others are more warming and traditional perfect on toast, and others have a more complex flavour profile which would liven up any breakfast porridge or yoghurt! 
  • Honey will always crystalise, it’s the glucose in it knitting around the pollen grains. How a honey crystalises depends on the balance of natural sugars in it. It’s a good sign of a raw honey
  • Most supermarket honeys are blends from all over the world (including China) to make sure the taste is always the same – even honeys from a single area in the UK will combine honeys from different hives and places.
  • Hive & Keeper’s honeys are different – they are numbered small batch raw honeys from a specific apiary, and a single point in time.  The beekeeper took the honey off one day and then it’s jarred – that’s it. It means that every Hive & Keeper honey keeps the natural characteristics that all the visits to flowers, the weather and what the bees needed at that point in time have created. 
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