It’s All About The Bees - From Polish to Honey

Simon Gilboy started restoring furniture in his parent’s garden shed over 30 years ago. Gilboy’s then went on to become established as a furniture restoration company. Now we manufacture and sell our own beeswax furniture polish and leather balsam.

So why sell honey?

Our relationship with Buckfast Abbey started when we were asked to restore some valuable, period pieces of furniture for the monastery.

Bees have been kept at Buckfast since 1882 and the Buckfast Bee queens are now kept by beekeepers all over the world.

The Buckfast Bee was bred by Brother Adam. During his 78 years of studying and breeding bees he became an international authority on beekeeping and was awarded an OBE for his work in 1974.

A dialogue began with the Buckfast Abbey Bee Department when we decided to develop a recipe for our own beeswax furniture polish. We chose them to supply the best quality, local beeswax. So began our interest in bees.

Fast forward six years and we now top up our Buckfast Abbey beeswax with beeswax from Neil Graham. Neil is able to produce the exact quality of beeswax that we require as Buckfast .

Neil was a psychiatric nurse for 30 years. He spent a lot of his working life in very challenging environments and when he left this profession he started beekeeping as a hobby. His passion for and knowledge of bees has grown along with his collection of hives. He started with one and now has over 200.

Neil was recommended to Gilboys by Claire and Martin at the Buckfast Abbey Bee Department. His methods, knowledge and approach mirror those developed by Brother Adam and the beekeepers at Buckfast today. The welfare of the bee is placed at the centre of their beekeeping philosophy and all honey is ethically produced.

Over the years, Neil has kindly gifted us samples of his honey as well as sharing his knowledge and passion about bees and honey. We were shocked to discover that the honey we buy can vary dramatically in terms of its quality, properties and potential benefits and started to do some research of our own.

Raw honey contains living nutrients, beneficial bacteria and enzymes which provide all the powerful health benefits of honey. In order to prevent honey from crystallising, processors heat the honey up to 75C/160F.
This process delays the crystallisation process, but it also kills every beneficial living nutrient in the honey. Dead honey has no health benefits. It is merely a sugar syrup.

The Haldon Honey bees collect pollen from clover, bramble, sweet chestnut and bell heather. This honey is gently filtered to remove impurities and then bottled. No heating or processing is involved in the production of this natural honey.
At Gilboy’s our philosophy has always been to deliver the highest quality products to our customers. We decided that we would sell pure honey. Honey which has not been processed or altered. Honey which not only tastes wonderful but is the product of bees rather than human engineering.

View our range of honey

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