7 years ago we discovered the amazing world of bees and decided to put Melbourne on the international map of urban honey production by taking up a practice that has been happening around the globe for over 100 years, city bee keeping.

The vision was to build a framework of local honey producing hubs as a sustainable business. So we started as hobbyists slowly perfecting our craft and building a network of urban bee-hives on green pockets of land and city rooftops with the aim of making locally sourced, sustainably produced honey available to everyone in and around Melbourne's CBD.

Other organic and environmental groups became the early hosts of our hives, their natural and chemical free methods of food production being the perfect fit, later followed by local retailers and organic gardeners who wanted to have some bees around to help their produce along.

Much thought and planning goes into siting the small scale hives, they are safely placed where the bees have access to a variety of flowers year round and can quietly work urban gardens, parks and nature reserves away from farmed GM crops. Keeping it simple seems the best way to us for doing things sustainably and nearly everything we do is manual. In line with the low carbon footprint policy most visits to the hives for maintenance and honey extraction are done on foot or bicycle. Honey is cold uncapped and hand extracted, labels are hand cut and pasted on jars, even our bees and equipment are transported on special locally built rickshaws.

It is a never ending pleasure working with bees, their resilience and resourcefulness motivated us to keep going when we were finding it hard to get such a new concept established in those early days – something, we're pleased to say, that's now recognized in the very countries that inspired our quest into such an interesting pursuit – but which is now rapidly gaining momentum around Australia.

We are dedicated to producing the best quality honey possible by focusing on bee health, local produce, and sustainability. As part of our carbon neutral philosophy and policy the honey sold by Urban Honey Co. is produced as close to the point of sale as possible, we aim to average within 5km, in some cases it is as little as a few metres.

Honey is cold uncapped and hand extracted.

Only the most basic filtering is carried out when the honey is collected and processed in order to retain the special properties that make raw honey such a remarkable and magical food and we think you can taste the difference from the care and effort that's put in.

The carriage awaits. First day of Spring and a cargo of bees wait to be unloaded in the hive to their new home at a Buddhist temple.

Our latest creation. Hand cut labels for our new marmalade ready to be pasted on to jars.

Just another day at the office. 100kg of bee hives take a ride to meet their new hosts.