Twenty years ago Helen Griggs taught herself how to keep bees.

That first year at her home in Newcastleton the honey yield was high, resulting in her giving away many jars to friends and family.

She quickly realised there was a demand.

It coincided with her having her daughter Kate - returning to her full-time job as a secretary at Edinburgh Woollen Mill wasn’t an option.

Fast forward two decades and now she sells on average 5,000 jars of Nook Farm Honey a year, supplies more than 30 outlets including most of Cumbria’s best-loved food shops and looks after more than 1million bees in the height of summer.

Helen lives at Nook Farm where she and her husband Duncan have about an acre of land.

“We moved here 22 years ago from Leicestershire and my husband started breeding pedigree Jacobs (a type of sheep) so I got a hive as a hobby,” she said.

She joined Carlisle Beekeeping Association and after taking advice from Cumbria Chamber of Commerce, sourced grants from Distinctly Cumbrian to buy equipment, set up a website and turn an outbuilding into a workshop and bottling room.

She now has 30 hives at four apiary sites within five miles of her home, with about 50,000 bees in each hive.

Depending on weather and other conditions the hive can yield between 30lb to 100lb of honey.

“Honey has become more trendy recently as people try to eat more healthily and buy local with more traceability and from sustainable sources,” she said.

To keep up with demand she sources honey from other beekeepers in the UK to complement the 500 to 800 jars she makes each year from her own bees, mainly single flower honeys like borage and balsam.

“It’s really all dependent on the weather… some years we don’t get any honey, that happened a few years ago,” she said.

She is a one-woman business although she uses a courier service to deliver the honey.

Apart from that she does everything herself, selling at Carlisle and Brampton farmers’ markets and also dealing with the online orders, which make up about 50 per cent of her £30 to £35,000 turnover a year.

Her honeys have won Great Taste Awards and have been stocked in shops in London, but these days she prefers to sell locally.

“I prefer to keep it local, less food miles, but I post honey across the UK to people who want high quality honey.”