Two people, one mountain in the Pülümür highlands, six months a year.
Why Pülümür
Pülümür is known across Türkiye for its honey. The district's high meadows carry an unusually dense mix of wild thyme (kekik), astragalus (geven) and endemic mountain flowers, and the area celebrates that reputation with an annual honey festival.
Our hives sit in that landscape, at Yastık village, at roughly 1,900 metres. The village lies in Erzincan province today, though the wider Pülümür area was historically part of Tunceli — the two sit either side of the same mountain country, and the flora does not recognise the boundary.
Hüseyin & Kadriye
Hüseyin spends half the year in Incirliova, Aydın, where he works as a rendering specialist in construction. The other half, from spring through autumn, he is at Yastık tending the hives that have been part of his family's life for generations.
He doesn't do it alone. His wife, Kadriye, works the hives beside him every season — from the spring feed through to the August harvest. It is a genuine two-person operation, built on decades of doing this together.
The bees
The colony is Carniolan (Apis mellifera carnica) — gentle to work with and well suited to mountain climates with sharp seasonal changes. Hüseyin feeds them a light sugar supplement only during the spring survival window, before natural forage is available. Once the Pülümür meadows open, the feeding stops entirely and the bees range freely across roughly 18 varieties of wild thyme, astragalus and highland flowers.
The harvest
Frames are capped by the bees on their own timeline, then cut by hand — never spun in an extractor. What arrives at your table is the comb exactly as the hive built it: raw, unheated, and unfiltered. Annual output is roughly one tonne, and every batch is individually numbered.
Getting it to the UK
Ozgur Dinç (Hüseyin's son) and Oktay Cinpolat (his son-in-law) manage the export side of the business from the UK, making sure each batch reaches British customers properly and legally.