Bermondsey Street Bees
Raw English Honey & Lifestyle Products
About Bermondsey Street Bees
Bermondsey Street Bees is a multi-award-winning sustainable beekeeping practice founded in 2007 by Dale Gibson and Sarah Wyndham Lewis. Their town and country apiaries offer single-source artisanal raw honeys with immense depth of character and fabulous stories told through their flavours, just like fine wines or olive oils. Their raw honeys are perfect wholefoods, produced using only artisanal methods including hand extraction and minimal filtering to preserve the flavours and nutrient value of the final product. Every honey varietal has its own unique terroir, and a distinct individuality and seasonality to be explored and celebrated.
Bermondsey Street Bees have apiaries both inside and outside London, on wild, rewilded or regeneratively managed land, and their traditional way of beekeeping places bee health & welfare ahead of any honey production. Since the beginning too, Dale and Sarah have shared an unshakeable commitment to sustainability and net biodiversity gain, a core element of which has been their public and private realm gardening initiatives, planting to feed not only honeybees, but all pollinators.
Bermondsey Street Bees have always supplied the majority of their honey into high end hospitality, serving Michelin Starred chefs and leading bartenders who support the production of exceptional British honeys. However Dale and Sarah are also passionate believers that consumers should have access to more knowledge about raw honey and be able to taste the difference. For them, honey is mankind’s original high energy treat – it’s long-lived and very versatile – and deserves more respect. In fact, they feel that consumer perceptions of honey should be a little more like coffee. A customer might very well go and buy a cheap commodity, or some ground coffee blend, but many will go out of their way to look for the most responsibly sourced or purest or highest quality beans – and they recognise the difference. Bermondsey Street Bees is on a mission to teach us about the million facets and complexities of honeys through education, advocacy, and the delicious product itself.
Bermondsey Street bees Production
Bermondsey Street Bees operates, in their own words, “bee-to-jar” with a transparent and holistic approach. Dale and Sarah are involved throughout, using artisan skilled and batch production processes that they’ve honed over the years, and they’re very proud of it. Bermondsey Street Bees breed gentle, productive honeybees to co-exist peacefully with people. They keep them healthy using traditional techniques and treatments derived from sustainable plants. Most importantly, they leave their bees sufficient winter stores and harvest only when a surplus is produced well beyond the overwintering needs of the colony.
They keep their bees in Western Red Cedarwood hives, where the bees deposit honey into the wax honeycombs they’ve built. When it is time to harvest any surplus honey, Dale gently pierces the wax cappings before placing the frames into a centrifugal extractor. This spins at high speed, freeing the honey to run down the interior of the stainless steel extractor drum. When the gate at the base of the drum is finally opened, the honey runs out into a coarse metal filter to catch any hive detritus, mainly large pieces of wax. At this stage, the honey is rested for a while, allowing air bubbles to rise, before it is passed through another coarse filter, with a 350-micron mesh. Depending on the viscosity of the honey, this can take between two and fifteen minutes. The honey is rested again, and a few days later, put through a 200-micron mesh filter; vitally, even this finer mesh allows all of the pollens naturally found in the honey to pass through intact.
Their raw honey is a whole food, meaning the pollen remains whole in the honey, the enzymes are left intact and the volatile aromas aren’t lost by heating or passing through metres of pipes. Once they have the near-final product, it is left to rest again at ambient temperature, before being turned into jars or chef’s buckets. Real, slow food! Bermondsey Street Bees operates a no-waste system so that all honey is used either as food or as the base for their own cosmetic products. Even the beeswax is recycled, mainly into commercial kitchens where it us used by chefs to age meat and fish.
Bermondsey STreet Bees People
A highly experienced and dedicated beekeeper, Dale Gibson heads up Bermondsey Street Bees’ apiaries and Apis, its consultancy arm which undertakes apicultural audits and develops best practice blueprints for clients. He writes and speaks widely on issues around sustainable beekeeping in urban and rural settings.
Author of two books “Planting for Honeybees’ and ‘The Wild Bee Handbook’ , his co-founder Sarah Wyndham Lewis is a professional writer, food judge and Honey Sommelier, trained in the sensory analysis of honey with the prestigious Italian ‘Register of Experts in the Sensory Analysis of Honey’. She works with chefs and bartenders and runs raw honey tastings for these and other food and drinks industry professionals.
Having undertaken his formal beekeeper training, Dale’s reputation as a sustainable beekeeper began to grow. Living, at that time, in a Victorian warehouse on Bermondsey Street, his first apiary was located on the home rooftop., but before long he was inundated with offers of apiary sites across London and the surrounding counties. Meanwhile, Sarah went in a slightly different direction. Originally from a family of farmers and wine producers, she grew up hearing the language of analysis and flavour – and recognising the surprising amount of similarities between fine wines and honeys, she focused on building collaborations with other artisan food and drinks producers, This, ultimately, led her to Italy, to train as a Honey Sommelier.
Very soon their passion and combined knowledge and expertise started winning them awards, including the Small Artisan Producer of the Year 2016 from the Great Taste Awards in the UK. From the moment their business was founded, they opposed the idea of just parking hives across the cityscape and managing them for maximum honey income. Neither did they want to supply big retailers demanding quotas that could compromise quality. Instead, placing sustainability and excellence at the heart of Bermondsey Street Bees, they concentrated on supplying leading hotels, restaurants and bars, where knowledgeable chefs and bartenders want the very best in sustainably produced local ingredients.
Working so intimately with the natural world, they knew they had to give back too, and the driving ethos of the business has always been gentle, sustainable beekeeping and net biodiversity gain. Collaborating with a wide range of sustainability and biodiversity experts, as well as an international network of fellow beekeeping professionals, Dale and Sarah have become known for their advocacy and educational work. They also contribute time, data and resources to global bee research and raise money to train the next generation of beekeepers.
In response to London becoming crowded with fashion beekeeping leading to a steep rise in bee disease levels, Bermondsey Street Bees began relocating most of their central London apiaries from 2020 onwards. Many hives were resettled in the extensive rewilded areas of the far London Docklands, where they produce the award-winning honeys available in Limited Edition collaborations with Provenance Hub.
In 2022, Sarah and Dale also moved, relocating their family home and production to 4 acres of Essex coastal farmland, once a strawberry farm. Here, at last, they have space to create a regenerative ecosystem which they are planting and managing to feed and provide habitat for a wide range of native wildlife.
Dale Gibson
A highly experienced and dedicated beekeeper, Dale Gibson heads up Bermondsey Street Bees apiaries and Apis, their consultancy arm which undertakes apicultural audits and develops best practice blueprints and other policy collateral for UK and international clients. He writes and speaks and advises widely on issues around sustainable beekeeping in urban and rural settings.
Sarah Wyndham Lewis
His Co-Founder Sarah Wyndham Lewis is a professional writer and Honey Sommelier, trained in Italy with the prestigious ‘Register of Experts in the Sensory Analysis of Honey’. She speaks and writes extensively on honey, judges in leading food awards and works with chefs, bartenders and specialist honey producers all over the world. She is the author of two books, “Planting for Honeybees’ and ‘The Wild Bee Handbook’.
