In a world that never stops accelerating, I’ve chosen to slow down. My Breton honeys are drawn out the old way: cold, unhurried, on a rhythm set by a single annual harvest rather than by demand. My hives sit on the Presqu’île Sauvage, between Paimpol and Tréguier, in the Côtes-d’Armor, at Kermenguy in the village of Pleumeur-Gautier. It’s a landscape of real contrasts: some conventional, cultivated farmland alongside genuinely wild stretches of heather, hedgerow, and sea-facing coast, roughly evenly split between the two.

You won’t find propolis or pollen harvested here, and that’s deliberate, not an oversight. Between climate change, pesticides, insecticides, and the growing pressure of the Asian hornet, my bees are already working hard enough, propolis is theirs to keep. The propolis in my products comes instead from partner beekeepers in Peru, more on that on the Pérou page.

You might also notice these honeys aren’t certified organic. Certification requires proving the foraging radius around every hive meets strict standards, and across France’s patchwork countryside, that’s nearly impossible to demonstrate on paper, even on land as carefully tended as this one. I’d rather be upfront about that than make a claim I couldn’t stand behind.

The Black Bee of Brittany (Apis mellifera mellifera)

A Breton bee, endemic and pure specie in danger of extinction.

The land, and the harvest

The land I tend is pesticide-free, more parkland than farmland really: fruit trees, flowering hedges, and open ground my father tends with real care, all of it shaped over years rather than planted for any single purpose. Buckwheat has a long history in this part of Brittany, and it's the plant this whole honey range takes its name from, though I don't cultivate it myself. Some years I've planted a little, other years, this one included, I haven't, and the bees simply forage on whatever buckwheat is growing locally in the wider area, from neighboring fields rather than my own. Alongside it, a wide variety of native and exotic melliferous plants and trees fills the rest of the grounds, giving the bees plenty to work with well beyond any single crop.

The harvest itself happens once a year, in August, and never for more than the hives can comfortably spare. I use a cold press to extract the honey, an ancestral method that preserves its full character rather than rushing it through faster, more efficient equipment. It's slow, deliberate work: a single harvest, once a season, rather than the multiple extractions many producers rely on to maximize yield. The reward for that patience is a rich, living honey worth every hour it takes, and every month spent waiting for it.

A calendar written in flowers

Beyond the harvest itself, there's a whole calendar written in flowers. Before almost anything else has stirred, dandelions push up through frost-hardened ground, offering both nectar and pollen in real quantity at the exact moment a hive coming out of winter needs it most, a plant most people dismiss as a weed, doing some of the most important work of the entire year. Willow catkins and blackthorn blossom follow close behind in the cold months, when little else is offering anything at all. Gorse and broom take over through spring, painting the hedgerows and coastal paths a startling yellow that lasts for weeks. By early summer, bramble and white clover fill in the gaps, humble, unglamorous plants that nonetheless keep a hive fed through some of its busiest weeks. Then comes the real turn of the season: chestnut trees flowering briefly in June, agapanthus and lavender opening through July and August, sea holly holding its strange, silver-blue thistle-heads along the coastal dunes, and buckwheat, the plant this whole honey is named for, spreading across the fields in a haze of white. Bugloss and thyme thread through the same stretch of months, low to the ground and easy to overlook, though the bees never do. By late summer, heather takes the stage in its own right, turning whole hillsides that particular shade of purple-pink that says autumn is close. And through all of it, bellflower blooms along walls and garden edges, adding one more small thread to a calendar the bees follow with a precision no beekeeper could ever impose from the outside. None of these plants exists for the bees alone. This is simply what grows here, in its own order, in its own time, and the honey is what's left over once the bees have made their way through the whole of it, season after season, seemingly without ever really pausing.

This beautiful Black bee often qualified as aggressive by french beekeepers compare to her much popular and genetically modified sister: the english Buckfast, is actually an incredible pure specie that has shown me her incredible eagerness of development, dynamism and adaptability. Her only requirement is that she needs to evolve in a preserved nature where can she can express her full capacities as she has a strong dislike of cultured crops (such as oilseed rape flowers, colza etc) and more of a liking in wild flora. A true strong sailor, during her trips of prospecting the geographical areas in search of pollen, she is capable of flying up to 10 kilometres instead of the average of three! Another interesting note is that the Black bee queen can live up to 8 years when her cousin from Europe hardly reaches 4 years old.

Breton Honey: Cold Pressed, Raw & Unfiltered

Straight from Nature: A Living microcosme

Raw, cold-pressed honey typically contains: pollen grains from the flowers the bees foraged that season, small amounts of propolis, the resin bees use to seal the hive, trace amounts of beeswax, and the enzymes bees add during processing, primarily invertase and diastase, which convert nectar's sucrose into the simpler sugars found in honey. It also carries trace minerals, amino acids, and organic acids absorbed from the surrounding plants and soil, in small, naturally occurring amounts, along with a small percentage of water content that varies by season and harvest timing.

None of this is added afterward. It's simply what remains present in honey that hasn't been heated or filtered.

Why Cold Pressing?

Cold pressing and centrifugal extraction are mechanically different processes, and they produce different results by design. Centrifuge extraction, the standard commercial method, spins uncapped honeycomb frames at high speed inside a drum, using centrifugal force to fling the honey out of the cells while leaving the wax comb structure largely intact, which allows the comb to be reused by the bees. Cold pressing works differently: the entire comb, wax, honey, and all, is pressed directly, which destroys the comb in the process and yields less honey overall relative to the amount of comb used, since some honey remains trapped in wax fragments that centrifuge extraction wouldn't lose.

Temperature is the other major difference. Commercial honey is frequently warmed, often somewhere between 40°C and 70°C, to reduce its viscosity so it flows easily through industrial filtration and bottling equipment, and to slow or prevent natural crystallization, which many buyers associate with lower quality even though it's a normal property of raw honey. That heating measurably affects composition: diastase and invertase, the two enzymes bees add during nectar processing, degrade progressively with heat exposure, and diastase activity specifically is used as a recognized laboratory indicator of how much a honey has been heated, since fresh, unheated honey shows higher enzyme activity than honey that's been warmed for processing.

Filtration compounds this further. Fine filtration, standard in most commercial honey production, is capable of removing the large majority of pollen grains from the final product, to the point where ultra-filtered honey can become difficult to trace back to its geographic or floral origin at all, since pollen content is one of the main ways honey's source is scientifically verified. Cold-pressed honey skips this step entirely, so pollen, along with small amounts of wax and propolis, remains present in the jar rather than being filtered out.

Passing it on: Beekeeping for Local Schools

Kermenguy has become more than a home base. It’s where I’ve started thinking seriously about what it means to hand all of this down. I love bringing children into contact with the hives, not to make beekeepers of them necessarily, but to give them one real, embodied encounter with how a living system works: patience, attention, reciprocity.

I already offer a beekeeping introduction program for local schools in the area, so more children here in the Côtes-d’Armor can have the same experience I did, the first time I really saw a hive. If you’re part of a local school and interested in a session for your class, reach out and we can talk through timing and cost.

"The children were thrilled and moved by the chance to get close to a hive and discover the life of bees. She passed on her passion, and her care for the species, to every one of them."
- Cathy, teacher, CE2-CM class