Labelled.

I had planned to make my own labels for this years honey crop and after a couple of hours tinkering with GIMP  I came up with a design I was happy with.

Dual monitors, it's the way forwards.

I printed it out and discovered there was a problem with my printer as the bright yellow in the image was a dull green and the black came out green tinted too. Also my labels were just a few millimetres too big to go comfortably on my jars. I could probably sort out the printer -probably a blocked nozzle or duff ink cartridge, it doesn't see much use after all. But I'd still have to source some new labels the right size for my jars, find a template and redesign the labels to fit the new format so I decided to to just buy some instead.

Thornes do a huge range of customised labels and to be honest they're not that expensive, especially compared to about £30 quid for a new set of ink cartridges for my HP Photosmart 3310. With a little help from my housemate I finally settled on a fairly tasteful image of a slightly blurred garden picture in greens and browns with a white WBC hive on one side. The labels are customised to show whatever text you want which is important as there's laws about honey labelling requirements.

If you're selling honey the label has to have the word Honey on it, a contact address for the manufacturer, the weight in metric, the country of origin and a Best Before date. Honey can actually go for years without spoiling -when I say years we're talking about honey being found in ancient Egyptian tombs and still being edible, granulated to hell no doubt but edible nonetheless ..but our society likes it's best by dates it's not like salt expires either but there you go. Oddly the country of origin has to be seperate from the contact address. Anyway I opted for the label to say Raw Garden Honey and used some spare room to point out it's unprocessed and unfiltered.

Ready made labels

When the labels arrived they actually look a lot better than the output of my photosmart printer with a plasticy surface that I suspect mean the ink isn't going to run if it gets wet in a kitchen, and probably means the labels are relatively easy to remove later. Whilst I was ordering labels I decided to get a pack of granulation labels too. They're not totally necessary but, as I mentioned earlier, honey has a hellishly long shelf life and with time it granulates. The granulation label just goes on the back of the jar and tells people why it happens and what to do about it.

Granulation label

Having removed one jar for personal use I still had 41 jars to label. It's safe to say labelling jars isn't the most exciting part of beekeeping so I'll spare you a blow by blow account of that and you can thank me later.

41 jars and 82 labels later

One was jar actually a short measure so I gave it to a mate -can you imagine a better xmas present than a 3/4 full jar of honey? Exactly. Me neither. So now I've got 40 jars of 370g Raw Garden honey to shift. Doing the math it seems that the general consensus that beekeepers break even by their second honey crop and make profit by the third is about right. Bit of a shame I gave away all the first year's crop really but still pretty good considering it's been a bad year for bees with record low honey crops. I've already had some interest from people wanting to buy jars so I'm hoping it should go fairly quickly.