Littleover Apiaries started life in the late 1990’s as a small Derbyshire honey farm. Our founder, Tony Spacey, was fanatical about the quality of his honey and the welfare of his bees. This quickly became apparent by the range of his English honeys. The company started to take on extra bee keepers in the year 2001 and the rest, as they say, is history.
Today Littleover Apiaries is one of the major honey producers and packers in Europe, and in 2008 we started to be a truly global company with contract operations across the globe.
We still pride ourselves in being a “family” company, with two members of the family still being actively involved with the company;
In 2012 a young lady called Ilze joined us in our packing department. It rapidly became apparent to Tony that she had a passion for honey to match his own, over the following couple of years with his guidance, Ilze has worked in every department, learning everything possible about honey, organic processes, the different properties of active honey et al. From local honey to honey from around the world, from the beehive to the laboratory.
Now Miss Ilze Strangate is the managing Director of Littleover Apiaries and as Tony and Jan become older she will carry on the family passion with her own children who are keen to be looking after the bees and the honey. So the family legacy will continue. This has enabled Tony to take a step back, he is now Chairman of the Littleover Group but still likes to keep an eye on what is happening.
Over the years we have won many, many accolades for our honey, including 16 Gold, Silver and Bronze Great Taste Awards, The Taste of Lincolnshire, The Peak district Environmental Quality Mark, Guild of Fine Food Retailers approval and, the jewel in the crown, EFFSIS – the European Food Safety Inspection Standard.
When we started we packed in glass and we have stuck firmly to our policy of glass packaging even when tempted by those cute little bear shaped plastic squeezy bottles we stood firm. We use recycled packaging wherever possible and all of our packaging is recyclable.
Care of the environment is important to us and to the bees. Our love for the environment made us look at producing an organic honey, we sought advice from the Organic Food Federation and with their guidance we worked to becoming organically certified and as you will see from our range of organic honeys we proudly display their certification mark.
We are working to extend our range of organic honeys all the time. As a result, although not all of our honeys are organic, they are all produced to organic standards. We have no chemicals on our premises, everything is natural. We never heat treat or pasteurise ANY of our honeys all of our honey is raw and natural as the bees have made it.
During the 2002 honey crisis, when many others were forced to withdraw products from sale after the government found chemical contamination in some honeys, Littleover Apiaries were totally unaffected. Then in 2008/2009, following two years of very poor honey crops, we were the only major producer to still able to supply “ALL” our customers with English Honey. If you would like to become a distributor of Littleover Honey, then please contact us here.
We will continue to endeavour to constantly raise our standards and be at the forefront of the British Honey Industry, whilst also committing to putting something back into our communities. We currently donate over 10% of our profits to charities all around the world.
Keep up to date with our latest news from the hive by clicking here. You can also like us on Facebook here.