Sweet success as local honey bags top international award

Beelal’s raw unpasteurised organic honey was awarded platinum status at the 2021 London Honey Awards

18 August 2021 - 11:01 By hilary biller
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Beelal's award-winning honey.
Beelal's award-winning honey.
Image: Supplied/Beelal

I’ve always had a thing for honey, and my fascination with it goes way beyond drizzling a sweet golden pool of the stuff over hot buttered toast.

I’m interested in what goes into the bottles of honey we buy in the supermarket. The lack of legislation around honey production means some unscrupulous producers mix their honey with golden syrup, and others bottle a blend of honeys from around the globe that land in SA because they are cheaper than locally produced versions and, in some cases, because no other countries will take the products. 

This certainly isn’t the case with Beelal, a raw unpasteurised organic honey from hives in the heart of the fynbos region in the Western Cape. It was recently awarded platinum status — yes, higher than gold — at the 2021 London Honey Awards. It was one of only 44 global honeys to be given this honour.

Part of the charm of this honey is the story behind it.

It’s produced by the Beilal Khan and his family. They learnt about different varieties courtesy of Beilal’s travels. Wherever he went, he’d bring home a jar of honey as a souvenir.

Sana Khan and her father Beilal removing honey from their hives.
Sana Khan and her father Beilal removing honey from their hives.
Image: Supplied/Beelal

A recent move to Cape Town prompted Beilal to take up beekeeping, the drawcard being the unique fynbos in the area.

His daughter, Sana, a 20-year-old student who runs the administrative side of their honey business, recalls the excitement of her father’s first harvest from their own hives in September last year.

It was the deeply aromatic, dark-coloured and dense honey from their January harvest that prompted them to send a sample to a specialised lab in Germany for analysis. The results confirmed what they suspected: it was an excellent and uniquely floral honey.

This gave them the confidence needed to enter the London International Honey Awards.

Said Sana: “It was our first entry and it was expensive to send it to the UK. When lockdown meant the awards were postponed, we became worried the competition would never happen and kept checking the webpage for results,” she said.

“We kept looking at the lower end of the results — the silvers and bronzes — not thinking we’d get anything higher.”

Instead their honey took top honours: the platinum rating means it was scored between 95.5% and 100% by the judges.

Since their win, Beelal’s honey sales are buzzing. Their award-winning honey is available in limited quantities for R300 a bottle online, or at the Neighbourgoods Market in Woodstock, Cape Town, on Saturdays.


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