Wiltshire's main honey event is the Bee & Honey Day, held every autumn by the Wiltshire Beekeepers Association at the Corn Exchange in Devizes. It includes the County Honey Show, with entries from Salisbury to Swindon, as well as talks, candle rolling and stalls selling honey, and Wadworth brews a honey beer for the day using local honey.
The county's honey varies with its landscapes. Potterne Honey has hives around Potterne, Devizes and on Salisbury Plain, taking in woodland, hedgerows, gardens and the Kennet and Avon Canal, and each apiary gives a different flavour. The Wiltshire Honey Co's apiaries in the parish of Savernake produce a soft-set honey naturally. At East Knoyle, Bellorama Honey Bees works village garden flowers and the lime trees around the Clouds Estate, and has helped a local farm sow borage into its wildflower mix. The same beekeeper is breeding towards the native dark honeybee. Clever Girls Honey near Redlynch takes hives to the New Forest after the summer harvest for heather honey.
Most Wiltshire honey is bought straight from the beekeeper or online. Hive & Keeper also sells honey from Mark Rees' garden hives in Ramsbury, bottling harvests from different points in the summer separately. For swarms and beekeeping contacts, the Wiltshire Beekeepers Association has local branches, including Kennet BKA around Calne, Chippenham, Devizes and Marlborough, which offers free swarm collection.
The Plain's unimproved grassland carries clover, bird's-foot trefoil, knapweed, marjoram and scabious in a mix that most English farmland lost decades ago, and colonies sited around its margins work a genuinely wildflower crop. Sainfoin — an old chalk-country forage legume enjoying something of a revival — is grown on some downland farms and is a superb nectar source. Around the edges of the county, the Avon, Kennet and Wylye valleys bring willow, hawthorn and a long bramble season, while the arable land in the north towards Swindon adds oilseed rape and field beans. Savernake and the West Woods contribute lime and sycamore.
Light amber, floral and clean, with a firm fine-grained set. Downland honey from the Plain has a distinct herbal quality from marjoram and thyme.
Flowering times are typical and can shift by two to three weeks with the weather, season and altitude.
Salisbury, Swindon, Chippenham, Devizes, Trowbridge, Marlborough, Warminster, Melksham
Sainfoin is a deep-rooted chalk-country legume, once grown widely as fodder and now returning on some downland farms. It is an excellent nectar source and gives a pale, delicately flavoured honey. Volumes are small and it is rarely sold as a single crop, but Wiltshire is one of the few counties where you might find it.
Because it has largely escaped modern agriculture. Long-term military use has left tens of thousands of acres of unimproved chalk grassland with a flora — clover, trefoil, knapweed, marjoram — that has been lost from most farmed land. Colonies around its margins get a genuine wildflower forage that is hard to find elsewhere in southern England.
Use the listing details to choose how to buy, then contact the producer before travelling.
The directory does not track live stock or harvest dates. Availability, collection, delivery, prices and seasonal varieties can change, so ask the producer to confirm what is currently available.
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