They want the same thing, right?
Beekeeping is a broad church, as they say, with all sorts of people taking part in the craft for many reasons. There does currently appear to be something of a rift, perhaps widening to a chasm, between a vocal section of hobby beekeepers and the majority of bee farmers. Let’s take a hypothetical bee farmer, called Monty, who runs 200 colonies, treats for varroa, buys queens from the continent and moves hives about the countryside. Contrast him with a section of hobby beekeepers who think that all three of those bee farmer traits are somewhere between misguided and evil.
I run 50 to 70 production colonies in Cheshire, UK, so I am a small bee farmer. Americans might call me a sideliner, as if there is something much bigger going on in my life. I also edit a magazine called Bee Farmer and regularly meet with other bee farmers to talk about, you guessed it, football. No, bees actually, always bees. I have spent enough evenings in village halls to know that most hobbyists are thoughtful people who want healthy bees and honest honey. So do I. This post is my attempt to show that we are on the same side, and that the practices some people dislike follow from arithmetic rather than greed or ignorance.
One Jar In Ten
Let’s start with honey. In the UK we eat a great deal of it and make very little. Defra’s 2019 honey seminar says our country imports around 90% of its honey, about 50,000 tonnes a year, with “only 5-10% UK-origin honey.” The Food Standards Agency (FSA) puts imports at 51,400 tonnes in 2022, with China supplying 68% of that by volume, followed a long way back by Mexico, Poland, New Zealand and Vietnam. The Bee Farmers’ Association (BFA) reckons the UK produces around 14% of what it consumes. There doesn’t seem to be an official production figure, so pick your estimate; roughly one jar in ten is British.
Here’s the thing. All British beekeepers, from somebody with two hives in their garden to Denrosa Apiaries with their 5,000 colonies, produce British honey. And all of that honey added together fills about 10% of the shelf, with the rest coming from overseas. The honest case for British honey is not that it is necessarily better than imported honey, but that you know where it came from (sort of) and by buying it you are supporting British food producers.
Suspicious Honey
A lot of what fills the other nine jars is suspect. The European Commission’s “From the Hives” exercise sampled 320 consignments of imported honey and found that 147 (46%) were suspected of being non-compliant. Of the Chinese consignments, 74% were flagged. In 2024, the Honey Authenticity Network sent 30 jars to an Estonian laboratory for DNA testing: 24 of the 25 imported jars failed, and all five from UK beekeepers passed, as did the one supermarket jar that happened to be British.
I used to say supermarket honey was little more than sugar syrup. I have to moderate that because it is not what the evidence says. “Suspicious” is not “proven”. The Commission’s methods were qualitative, and the FSA is clear that there is still no single test that can determine honey authenticity; the Government Chemist found a much more nuanced picture than the headlines. Fair enough. But the general pattern so far is that imported blends fail, British samples pass. That is the selling point for all of us, and it is why British honey is enjoying a moment, which I hope continues.
What 200 Hives Looks Like
To make a living from honey, rather than a pleasant supplement to a pension, you need a lot of bees. The BFA’s rule of thumb is that one efficient person can run about 150 colonies part-time or 300 full-time. Well, I must be a pretty inefficient person because those numbers seem hugely demanding to me. Here is my own back-of-the-envelope model. It is mine, not the industry’s, although it is influenced by experience and page 213 of Healthy Bees, Heavy Hives which shows financial details of one particular bee farming operation.
Assumptions: 35 kg average crop per hive, 10% colony losses, £8.80 per kg sold in bulk, £5.00 per 340 g jar at wholesale.
| Honey Business |
Bulk route |
Wholesale jar route |
|---|---|---|
|
Revenue target |
£80,000 |
£80,000 |
|
Units |
about 650 ten-litre buckets |
16,000 jars |
|
Honey needed |
9.1 tonnes |
5.4 tonnes |
|
Hives at 35 kg |
about 260 |
about 155 |
|
Not in the costs below |
nothing |
jars, lids, labels: about £8,000 |
|
Running costs (bulk route) |
£ |
|---|---|
|
Vehicle |
7,000 |
| Staff (not owner) |
10,000 |
|
Feed |
3,000 |
|
Medication |
2,000 |
|
Queens |
4,000 |
|
Hives, frames, foundation |
3,000 |
|
Repairs and renewals |
2,000 |
|
Rent and utilities |
2,000 |
|
Loan repayment |
5,000 |
|
Sundries |
2,000 |
|
Total |
40,000 |
What’s left to live on: £40,000 before tax. On the jar route, after packaging, nearer £32,000 unless you sell direct at a higher price, which means markets, websites, and weekends.
Capital to get there: comfortably over £100,000 for a building, a truck, extraction and bottling kit, and 260 hives with their supers.
Look at the numbers and three things jump out. You need around 155 to 260 colonies to pay one modest salary. Each colony has to average a honey yield of 35 kg, which in Cheshire, based on my experience, is achievable most years. And a 10% loss rate is baked into the plan; at 20% you are replacing 40 colonies a year (on Monty’s 200 colony operation) and the queen and equipment costs increase as the amount of honey harvested falls.
Why Treat?
My 10% loss figure is fairly typical for me, and for many bee farmers that I have asked about this. The National Bee Unit’s (NBU) husbandry survey put winter losses in England and Wales at 20.8% in 2024/25, 16.8% the year before and 20.9% the year before that. The BBKA’s own survey came in around 22%. Treatment does not get me from 20% to 10% on its own; knowing how to keep bees properly does matter, and that comes with experience. Good queens and good weather help enormously too. But varroa is the thing that kills fastest when ignored. Last season my losses were 20%, so things don’t always go to plan (I had significant queen-mating issues).
What happens if you stop treating? The standard review is blunt: “Without periodic treatment, most of the honey bee colonies in temperate climates would collapse within a 2–3 year period.” On Gotland, where Swedish researchers left colonies alone to see what survived, more than 80% died within three years. Tom Seeley’s group left colonies untreated in large, conventionally managed hives for two years: 10 of 12 died (versus 4 of 12 in small hives allowed to swarm).
And what manner of bee survives? Gotland’s resistant colonies are small. In the French Avignon population, the treated, susceptible colonies next door produced almost twice the honey. Survival and a crop are not the same thing, and I think we can and should strive for more than mere survival.
The October 2026 issue of Bee Craft has a revealing article on page 15 about the Better-B project, which involves following a set protocol in various countries in order to try to produce varroa-resistant bees. I remember Martin Bencsik giving a talk to bee farmers about this project before it started. Anyway, safe to say that things are not going swimmingly at the three-year point in a four-year project. In some countries, there was a total wipe-out, but at least in the UK five queen lines have survived so far.
Another recent snippet from Willie Robson in Bee Farmer magazine (October 2026): “I think varroa will be with us forever and a day, and colonies will never become resistant. Three or four years ago I thought they might well become resistant.” He’s been trying to encourage resistance by reducing treatments, but seems to be losing faith.
I can hear the thoughtful hobbyist already. “Those losses are the price of selection. I can afford to lose three of my six hives; you can’t afford to lose 150 of your 260. So I am doing the long-term work the industry won’t pay for, and you call me irresponsible.” It is a fair point and I will concede that treatment is a treadmill. Amitraz resistance in varroa is already documented in commercial operations in the USA, which is why I rotate products and prefer organic acids.
But selection only works if it is actually selection. Gotland was an island with a closed population and people counting mites. Six hives in a suburb where forty neighbours treat is not the same thing. When an untreated colony collapses in August, its mites go next door. Some call these mite bombs, and beekeepers who find their autumn mite counts spiking near to a treatment-free apiary are not imagining it. If you want to breed resistant bees, monitor, record, control the mating and talk to your neighbours. That is a project worth doing. Letting them die in a garden is not. And, to be clear, controlling the mating is where most small breeding projects will fail.
Why Buy Queens?
Returning to Monty, with his 200 hives, could he raise his own queens and maybe select for varroa resistance while he’s at it? Unlikely. He’s got to produce tonnes of honey. Furthermore, he’s not on an isolated island or peninsula, so he cannot easily control the drones that his queens would mate with. So Monty buys queens from people who do nothing but raise queens. Last year the NBU logged import notifications for 9,519 queens, 4,161 of them from Italy, with Slovenia, Greece, Romania, and Denmark behind. No packages or nucs, as since 2021 only queens may come in from the EU, each consignment with a health certificate issued within 24 hours of despatch. Monty may not import them himself; he’ll buy from a UK supplier who acts as the middle-man.
Does that carry risk? Yes! Of 31 samples the NBU examined in 2025, 13 tested positive for varroa, and the Northern Ireland back door is an unknown quantity. GB officials have no figures for queens arriving via Northern Ireland, and NI officials report those imports have risen since 2021.
Tropilaelaps would be a disaster. The regime exists because the risk of importing exotic pests is real, and I would rather it were tighter than pretend it is not essential.
But here is the irony. Much of the serious work on varroa-resistant bees is happening on the continent. Arista Bee Research reports more than 300 beekeepers and over a thousand monitored colonies in Italy alone and claims its rental hives now run at around 1% infestation. That is the breeder talking, not an independent trial, and Arista itself admits some colonies still carry enough mites to need treating. I am not telling you that treatment-free bees are for sale. I am saying that if they ever are, they will probably be from the Netherlands, Germany or Italy, and the hobbyist who objects to European queens on principle will be the last to get them. Furthermore, I’m pretty sure that demand for such queens would be off the charts, assuming they are good bees as well as varroa resistant.
Local Bees
This brings us to the dark bee. I have argued on this blog for years that British honey bees are a cocktail of M and C lineage and that chasing purity is mostly futile. BIBBA clearly disagrees, and that particular conservation group now cites “Breeding and rearing of locally adapted bees as a stepping-stone towards the restoration of native and near-native bees,” among its aims. It also says that it furthers its aims by, among other things, “Opposing the importation of queens and package bees from outside the British Isles and Ireland.” I would argue that the desire for the conservation of native bees has spilled over into a desire to turn the whole country into a conservation area, which is pushing things way too far.
The best recent data agree with me, in the main. A whole-genome study of 70 British and Irish colonies from beekeepers keeping non-imported stock found that 53 showed introgression and 17 did not. Ireland is a large reservoir; Colonsay and parts of the South West hold pure colonies too, so the ship has not sailed everywhere. Where it has not, I would support measures to protect what is there. Conservation is important and worthy of support, but it is not the same thing as food production; they are separate and should be able to co-exist.
The “ban imports” contingent’s strongest card is the COLOSS experiment: 597 colonies of 16 genotypes in 20 apiaries across Europe, and colonies with local queens survived 83 days longer. Local adaptation is real. There are two caveats, however. Eighty-three days of extra life is modest. No treatments were applied for the whole trial, so most colonies of every origin died; the study tells you how bees fare untreated, not how an Italian queen fares in a treated commercial apiary with a feeder on. Monty buys what makes honey and overwinters well. If a dark bee does that in his location, he will buy her. Colour is not a performance trait.
Effect on Wild Bees
“You cram too many hives in one place,” say some people. Occasionally, they might be correct. The best review of the question found that 53% of competition studies reported negative effects on wild bees, 28% none and 19% mixed, and that most measured the potential for harm rather than harm itself. The sharpest evidence of damage comes from Mediterranean scrubland, where dense apiaries halved wild bee nectar foraging success within about 600 metres. The best-known null result is from German calcareous grassland, where wild bee richness did not track with hive density at all. NatureScot calls the evidence circumstantial but mostly pointing one way, and says intensity depends on density and distance.
Hive density is the important thing, not ownership. Forty hives on a field of oilseed rape for three weeks, spread across a two-kilometre foraging radius, works out by my sums at about three colonies per square kilometre. Kew reckons London can support 7.5 hives per square kilometre; some parts of the city have more than 50, and one square kilometre had 400.
Wild pollinators have declined 23% since 1980 and all of us should be thinking about colonies per square kilometre and forage, not about who is wearing the bee suit. The bee farmers I know who keep large numbers of bees close together do that over the winter when they are not flying. Once spring arrives, the bees are moved out to areas with forage, and more widely dispersed.
Worrying Message
The BBKA supports around 30,000 beekeepers and there are about 450 bee farming businesses in the UK. If the message from the many is that only honey from small local beekeepers can be trusted because the bee farmers use chemicals and foreign bees, then I am worried about how that message is received. It is a worry rather than a prediction, but perhaps fewer people will produce honey at scale here in the UK. The gap will be filled from China, Mexico and elsewhere, by overseas bee farmers who treat, buy queens and move hives, with significant additional travel to get here. No beekeeper in the UK wants that, do they? Buy local by all means. I would just ask that “local” not be sold as “the only honest honey.” “Buy British” has a nice ring to it.
Government Support
Should the government support bee farmers like some other farmers? I wouldn’t complain! Honey bees supply perhaps a third of UK crop pollination demand, with wild insects doing the rest, so the pollination case is weaker than beekeepers like to think, even though bee farmers do hire out colonies to fruit growers. I have definitely seen the benefits to honey bees (and their keepers) of the pollinator-friendly crops grown under the Sustainable Farming Incentive (SFI) scheme, so that’s good.
The better case is food security. A traceable domestic supply in a market where many imports fail screening seems like a good thing to me.
Where This Leaves Us
I treat my bees, as do the majority of UK beekeepers (my reading of the BBKA News article in August 2026, on the COLOSS Winter Loss Survey 2025-26, suggests over 80% of colonies were treated). Occasionally, I buy queens, but I also make them, using selected breeder queens and open-mating. This season I even migrated some colonies to sit alongside a field of borage for a month. If you think about Monty, he has more colonies and less time than I do, so he just buys queens, treats, and moves his bees about from crop to crop. If you scale that back to six hives the choices look different, and I would not tell you how to run them. But we are making the same delicious product, from the same country, and selling into the same tenth of the market. The people demonising bee farmers, if that’s not too extreme, are not protecting British honey. They are potentially thinning it out.
Whether you agree with me or not, feel free to comment, and I’ll reply as soon as I can.