Woldgate Honey: Meet the man using the North York Moors to make 'the best honey'

He felt he needed a stable career for his son - but in his wildest dreams never thought he would become a successful beekeeper.

"I was living in the south of Spain. We were just travellers doing a little bit of this, a little bit of that for work, busking and labouring. My son was born, and I thought I really need to find something that's a bit more of a career, a bit more long term.

"One of the guys I worked for said: ‘Why don't you come out beekeeping? He said, ‘I think you'd really like it’.

"I went out one September afternoon. I was 25 years old and I was just instantly hooked. I'd never even considered it before. And then there I was on this hillside overlooking Gibraltar and Ronda in the baking hot sun and just everything about it I thought was incredible. It just made sense. I just got it."

Mark was taught by a local beekeeper, nicknamed 'Dave The Bee', who sold all his honey in the village.

“He explained it to me from a commercial point of view. So I always saw it as a business, never just a hobby that I would then grow."

After a few months Mark separated from his partner, becoming a single dad and returned to the UK with his little boy - going back to his Yorkshire roots as his parents lived in Bridlington. This was 28 years ago - and Mark now runs an established business called Woldgate Honey.

"At that time in the late nineties, the East Yorkshire region was the best place in Britain to keep bees. The succession of the flowering crops, the weather, it was just an ideal place to start a beekeeping company. So I got a Prince's Youth business Trust Grant and a business mentor for a couple of years and just started the business," explains Mark.

"I bought a few bees and then just gradually grew it and everything I sold, I just ploughed it straight back into it and just grew the business."

Starting out with 20 hives, Woldgate Honey now boasts 2,500 hives across 90 sites in Yorkshire. At this time of year, Mark and his team visit the bees every two weeks on a cycle.

There can be up to 60,000 bees in each hive at the peak of summer. The hives are then taken to the Moors. “It’s hard up on the Moors, the weather is a bit more inclement. All they have to do now is produce the honey.”

In September, the honey is then harvested, ensuring every element is used and maximised from the honeycomb to the wax.

"The flowers in the lower land of East Yorkshire are coming to an end now - so, for a lot of people that's it for the year - they are not going to produce any more honey.

"But we are so close to the North York Moors we move everything up to the heather moors and we get the heather honey, and that's the best honey.

“At the moment we have a couple of teams of people out during the day harvesting the honey they have produced in the last month.

"Then another couple of us are working in the evenings and then we go in a couple of days later, we pick those hives up and transport them overnight and drop them off in the morning on the North Yorkshire Moor.

"They will stay there for six weeks and then the honey will be taken off mid September and then all the bees will be brought back for winter in the gentle climate down here."

Each hive produces approximately 50 kilograms of honey, which Mark then supplies to local food and drink businesses.

Mark says during the pandemic and subsequent lockdown they couldn't stop.

He says: "So when you have a lockdown, it doesn't matter. The bees carry on, they just keep growing. So we worked all the way through that. We had to just keep working to keep on top of them."

But the pandemic hit the business hard after supermarkets stopped chasing English honey, in favour of cheaper imports.

"After the pandemic, it became harder to find staff for people to work. The supermarkets also stopped chasing English honey and this is one of our current problems. When they cleared the shelves in the pandemic, they took the opportunity to really look at their profitable lines," says Mark.

"The local beekeepers, delis and farm shops were doing such a good job of promoting local honey. No one was really going to the supermarket wanting local honey. And they weren't convinced that maybe it was genuine or trustworthy.

"So the supermarkets took the opportunity to take it off the shelves in favour of cheaper imported products.

"That's really hit us now, so now we've got a bit of a backlog of honey. It's a tricky time. We've got to kind of get through this tricky time and hopefully we can get back to selling it in a big way."

Mark supplies quality honey to artisan food and drink brands. One such business is Nidhoggr Mead Co.

Honey Mead is one of the world’s oldest alcoholic drinks, made simply from fermented honey and famously enjoyed by the Vikings.

Its recent renaissance has been put down to the popularity of Norse culture, from television dramas such as Game of Thrones, to Royal Mail even featuring Viking artefacts on a limited edition set of stamps.

Hailing from York, the Viking capital of England, Nidhoggr Mead Co is riding that trend, as demand for its range of authentically crafted honey mead grows beyond its niche heritage.

Its Viking founder, Peter Taylor, appeared on the latest series of Dragons’ Den and, despite not securing investment, he’s seen the business go from strength-to-strength. He more than tripled production to 50,000 bottles a year, secured shelf space in Morrisons and started exporting to the US.

Peter explained why Woldgate Honey makes Nidhoggr Mead so special: “Using sustainably harvested, locally sourced honey is very important to us and one of the reasons that we’re able to craft such a superior quality mead.

"Many other mead brands use vast amounts of sugar and artificial sweeteners to flavour their mead, leaving an unnatural and unauthentic flavour. Using just Woldgate Honey in our product makes it not only more natural and clean, but also more authentic too.

"Woldgate Honey is the secret to our smooth, deep , lingering taste and flavour and our partnership goes from strength to strength.”

Mark says his own team are as busy as the bees working long hours harvesting the honey, picking up and transporting hives and tending to the bees, working early mornings and late nights.

"It's a real lifestyle. The bees just don't stop. They are wild animals. They will just carry on with their instinctive behaviour, no matter what's going on in the outside world. It's a really privileged position to see inside a hive - to see to watch what the bees do through a season, across a year.

"It's a really interesting thing to see, but also we're given access to 200 different places where we keep bees. All of those landowners welcome us and trust us with security and with respect for their land. And that's just such a great opportunity.

"No two days are the same. You're never in the same place for more than a day. You're constantly out and in the seasons and watching things change. It's fantastic."