Arataki Honey - Visitor Centre — Attraction in North Island

This is a great stop along the wine trail. They've done a nice job of making it basically a beekeeping museum. There's a little video of inside a hive, there are a few active hives or frames you can look at, there are panels of information about beekeeping and the local honey, and of course there's the tasting area. They don't tackily police the tasting, so you can try the honeys in your preferred order and compare a few you might be considering. It's really interesting how different the honeys are from one another. They sell all the honey products you could want, from edible honey and honey products to the cosmetics you see in tourist shops everywhere. I didn't do much comparison shopping but the prices seemed about average, which means a bit high. The staff was friendly when I entered, and as I paid and they gave me a winery map and some suggestions.

There's plenty of parking in the lot outside. It's just off Te Mata and near Black Barn, Te Mata, and Craggy...

This is an excellent retail shop with their housebrand honey products, third-party brand honey products, fragrances, and New Zealand souvenirs.

What we also enjoyed was the educational section where we can see the insides of bee hives, check out the bees in action, and read up about the different types of bees and other bee-related information.

There are many different flavours of honey available here, which we sampled at the tasting counter. We finally decided to buy Manuka Honey with UMF 15+, which is reasonably priced at $42 for 250ml. The beewax candles were also great, for mood lighting or when there are blackouts.

Would be back again for more honey and...

good range of local honey. staffs were helpful when approached. sadly we were muslim tourists with a child who have autism. He happened to take a toy that cost 1dollar and wandered outside thw shop. the staff went and took the item feom him without approching us the parents wchich made him looked bad and felt bad. we bought products that cost almost 200 dollars. I feel that the staff could be better traines to make customers feel more welcomed and did not give the treatment differently between people that looked or behave differently unless it is threatening to lives...