Steve Donohoe 
We made the same amount of honey with 14 fewer colonies My son Alex (a.k.a. the Mole) and I finally finished extracting honey on 23 September at 2.30pm. It has been a slog, but, apart from a small amount still in the Apimelter, our 2026 honey is now in buckets. I hope that it lasts … Read more
For the avoidance of doubt, I am a bee farmer and I run a business that sells honey and bees. My honey customers are local stores and farm shops, although I do sell direct to consumers at one small monthly market in High Legh. In terms of scale, it’s nothing very grand; we sell about … Read more
Why feeding pollen in July might help, and feeding it in September might not Back in March I wrote about honey bee nutrition, and I pontificated (yes, I do that) about the merits of feeding during a dearth. I said that I suspected my bees had suffered nutritional deficits in late summer, that this would … Read more
In recent times, beekeeping seasons have changed for me. Only ten years ago, the idea of swarming in April was preposterous, whereas now it’s normal. The so-called ‘June gap’, a period of little forage between spring and summer blooms, has compressed to almost nothing. For the last few seasons the majority of summer honey is … Read more
Greetings, bee-botherers and those interested in the care of honey bees with the goal of producing honey and bees for sale. I have been AWOL, I deserted my post, by which I mean that I haven’t written anything on here for many moons. There are reasons – call them excuses if you will – but … Read more
Spring is the perfect time to make queens — the bees are already primed to do it. From simple queenless splits to a double-nuc cell builder that produces 20 quality cells per batch, here’s how to work with the bees rather than against them.
Whether you want to raise a handful of queens without grafting, turn a swarm-prone double-brood colony into two thriving units, or run a continuous cell-building system through the summer, there’s an approach here that suits your scale and ambition. The bees already know how to do this; your job is simply to set up the right conditions.
No specialist equipment required — just a nucleus box, good timing, and a willingness to let the bees do what they do best. Queen rearing is one of the most rewarding skills in beekeeping, and it is far more accessible than most beekeepers realise.
Beekeepers blame queens for everything from bad temper to poor honey crops. But quality in the strict sense means one thing: reproductive competency. Here is what the research says about how to assess it — and why the old timers saying queens aren’t what they used to be may well be right.
How brief pollen shortages can weaken colonies weeks later I was going to write about the so-called “June gap” – a period between spring and summer when, at least in my area, the available forage for honey bees can dry up. However, the phenomenon can occur anytime, and it connects to apiary site selection, migratory … Read more