Another ‘double-header’ blog for you, and possibly the last one for a while 🙁 as the shows season comes to an end.

Shipston Food Festival

This, as the name implies, is a dedicated one-day food festival organised by Stour Valley Lions. And as it’s in Shipston well, Shipston Beekeepers just had to have a presence and our members Julia and Paul Neal, who live in Shipston, volunteered to organise the stand.

This Festival is a bit different to the village shows we attend in that they provide the gazebo so we can’t use our branded one. As it is a food festival they also wanted to see a food hygiene certificate, which Julia was able to sort, and our BBKA Public Liability insurance policy.

The Festival was well attended and sales were brisk on the Shipston stand; indeed so much so that they ran out of runny honey having sold 92 jars of various sizes! Total sales came to almost £800.

As always Shipston Beekeepers would not have been able to have a presence without the help of members on the stand and we thank Ray and Caroline Pearce, Graham Franklin and Julia and Paul Neal.

Bring and Taste Honey Show

Members will recall that, as a small Branch, for the last few years we have not done a fully fledged honey show but rather a ‘bring and taste’ event where everyone tastes all the items and votes for the best.

As we did last year we have a reduced list of classes, being runny honey, soft-set honey, mead, honey cake, and a frame ready for extraction.

This year’s show had a challenging start however as the landlady of The George in Brailes was unable to open the pub in the evening due to family circumstances – we only discovered this as members arrived at the pub. Thanks to the contacts that Paul Neal has in Shipston we were able to get into…The George in Shipston for the event.

Ray and Caroline Pearce had organised the evening, jars, cakes and mead were all laid out on a table along with tasting sticks and small cups for tasting the mead.