Hello spring! Beautiful bees and blossoming trees

Spring is a wonderful time in our orchards. The beauty and fragrance of the newly blossoming apple trees are appealing not only to us, but also to our busy working bees. They’re currently hard at work pollinating the apple flowers, and without their help, we wouldn’t be able to make our cider!

We have spent many years finding the right cider apple varieties that make our recipes special. We carefully select orchards from all around Herefordshire, ensuring that they are traditional unsprayed orchards, and we have built great working partnerships with the farmers. We strongly believe in letting nature prosper, which helps the trees to grow and bees to pollinate, making a delicious natural cider.

The current lockdown has brought many challenges, but one silver lining has been the vast improvement in air quality, allowing some parts of nature to bounce back. I don't know about you, but it seems to me that there are a lot more insects buzzing around this spring? With fewer cars on the roads, days seem like the Sundays we had when we were children: less noise, less bustle and much cleaner air. This can only be good news for our pollinators. Increasingly under pressure from the use of pesticides and pollution, it seems like our flying friends are getting a year off for once.

Did you know that there are over 16,000 known species of bees? Sadly some of these species are endangered and many more are in decline. We owe so much to bees, they are the main pollinators of around a third of our food supply and they’re also responsible for our honey. Not to mention they’re essential to making Napton Cider!

According to the Warwickshire Wildlife Trust, we can help our lovely bees by planting ‘nectar cafés’, which also make beautiful additions to your garden. You can find out more about the best flowers to use here. If you’re bored in lockdown and have a little spare time, or if you’re looking for something productive to do with the children, why not give your garden a glow up whilst also providing nutrition and a resting place for our brilliant bees.

Just have a look at this little guy having a drink, I bet he wishes it was Napton Cider!