For those who start beekeeping, probably as a hobby, or to save the world, some will become obsessed for the rest of their lives, and many will give up within three years. When reality crashes into idealism, there are casualties. That’s actually a good thing; it makes sense to keep looking until you find your ‘happy place’ – the activity that brings you purpose and joy. For me, beekeeping seems to be the obsession du jour (well, 13 years, actually). As an obsessed, potentially somewhat autistic being, I inevitably read and hear all sorts of points of view. The harsh realities of personal experience also forge my own, the latest of which I will now share. Here are my important beekeeping tips 2025 – hopefully they will be useful to somebody.

I’ll Get To That One Day

Firstly, something that many beekeepers know about, but possibly file under “I’ll get to that one day.” It concerns record keeping, specifically the Veterinary Medicine Administration Record, which is to be kept for five years (for each medicine applied to the bees). The importance of filling out this document and keeping it up to date was hammered home to me yesterday at the National Bee Unit (NBU), where I was attending a ‘Bee Health Day.’

As a keeper of food-producing animals, beekeepers in the UK must follow certain laws, which specify what you are allowed to treat your bees with, and what records you must keep. If you don’t do this, you are acting illegally, and can be prosecuted. Generally speaking, especially for smaller beekeeping operations, trading standards will issue you with a warning and/or improvement notice if you are in breach. For bee farmers who rely on sales of honey and bees for their living, matters can get serious. It’s possible to incur an unlimited fine and up to two years in prison for serious and persistent offenders.

You are only allowed, by UK law, to apply certain prescribed varroa treatments to your bees, no matter how ludicrous the rules may seem. For example, even pure, laboratory standard oxalic acid crystals cannot be legally used to treat your bees, by sublimation, for example. The only legal treatments are set out in the newly updated ‘Managing Varroa’ leaflet issued by the NBU (see page 26). Note the absence of home-made oxalic acid dissolved in glycerol treatments, or anything else home-made.

Despite this ‘red-tape’ being a bit of a pain, I’m sure most consumers of UK honey are grateful that laws and standards are in place to help differentiate our high-quality produce from some ‘honey’ that comes into the country from elsewhere. We may not like the laws, but hopefully most people will follow them, and try to change them over time through lobbying and evidence-based argument. You can grab a simple checklist below.

Varroa Non Treaters

While my Bee Health Day experience is fresh in my mind, I will comment on a snippet of information that I picked up yesterday. Apparently, over 20% of UK beekeepers are now ’non-treaters’ for varroa. On the one hand, they won’t have to fill out a VMD medicine administration record. On the other, many of those people, especially beginners, will be joining the ranks of people who give up within three years. That’s because the vast majority of honey bees in the UK will not be able to cope with varroa mites over the long term. Many will die, and will then be robbed out by other bees, spreading the varroa problem far and wide. I don’t blame beginner beekeepers; they just do what the local more experienced beekeepers, and their beekeeping associations, tell them to do.

I am all for properly funded and controlled breeding programmes to be set up and run to help move the dial towards varroa-resistance. However, your average five-colonies-in-the-garden type of beekeeper has no chance of developing a resistant strain of honey bee on their own. Not only that, but the whole ‘live and let die’ strategy creates unfortunate genetic bottlenecks in which many very desirable traits can be lost, such as being calm on the comb, gentle, and so forth. Kirsty Stainton wrote an excellent article covering this and more in Bee Farmer magazine in April 2025. You can access this via my podcast.

Swarming And Lost Honey

A while ago, I wrote about some ‘back of an envelope’ calculations concerning how much honey a beekeeper might lose if they lose a swarm from their bees. As usual, the answer is very much ‘it depends’. However, I ended up landing on a ballpark figure of 16 kg of honey lost, assuming it was a big colony before it swarmed. That’s about one super of honey (Langstroth medium) and would cost me about £235. Rather, I would lose that much in wholesale honey sales to local shops. If losing a swarm loses me the opportunity to earn £235 each time, I’m not a fan of swarming.

As luck would have it, I am trialing some hive scales made by Wolf-Waagen, and I was able to measure exactly the difference between similar colonies in similar areas. One swarmed, and the other did not. The hive that didn’t swarm made me 24 kg of summer honey, which I recently extracted. It had already given me 38 kg of spring honey, so those girls did well for me.

The other colony swarmed at 3pm on 27th June. It had collected 9 kg of summer honey before the swarm. As the non-swarmed colony continued to gain weight, the swarmed one remained flat for a few weeks, then it began to fall slightly. At the time that I realised that the new virgin queen had failed to mate, and gone missing, the difference was about 16 kg, but things went rapidly downhill in the queenless colony after that. In this case, the reality of lost honey seems to have matched up with my rough calculations.

Don’t Put Hives In A Row

Don’t put your hives in a row, and I’ll go further – don’t let them all look the same. The ‘hives in a row’ thing is something that I have gradually come to appreciate is a poor way of organising an apiary. There are several reasons:

1) drifting

2) lower mating success of virgin queens

3) increased risk of disease spread

1 and 3 are sort of the same, but I like information in threes 🙂

Drifting

The problem with a long row of hives is that you end up with loads of bees at the ends, and fewer in the middle. The end hives are piled high with supers, and full of honey, but those towards the middle tend to be more diminutive in stature. Both workers and drones drift between colonies, especially when they are in a row with the entrances all facing the same way.

A bee returning with a load of pollen or a honey stomach full of nectar is likely to be welcomed into any hive, as the occupants will welcome the additional resources. It appears that honey bees navigate to one end of the row, and move along from there. So, a bee that flew out of a hive in the centre of the row will return to one end, and may not make it back to the central hive, becoming an honoured guest of one of the first three hives at each end.

Lower Mating Success

It is for a similar reason that queens returning from mating flights fail to make it back to the correct hive if it is in the middle of a long row of hives, particularly if they all face the same way and look similar. She will find her way back to the end of the row, but may enter one of those hives rather than work her way down the row to her original hive. The outcome is likely to be that she is killed, but she may take over; in either case, her original colony is now probably hopelessly queenless, and doomed.

A better hive configuration is for them to be in groups of up to four, with entrances at 90 degrees to each other, and each entrance can be differentiated from the others using colour or patterns.

Disease Spread

Finally, there’s another thing I heard about from the National Bee Inspector yesterday. We were discussing chronic bee paralysis virus, and how it can spread through an apiary with devastating results. He explained that since he had changed his hive placement from rows to groups of four (at 90 degrees to each other) he has not seen the disease spread widely through an apiary, but contained to one or two colonies. He also quickly clears up and buries the dead and dying bees on the ground beneath the hive entrance, as these are a big factor in spreading it. Anecdotal though this is, I don’t really need another reason not to place hives in rows, but it’s a good one.

Extract Honey When It’s Warm

My blog post about honey processing stated that supers at 30 degrees C would yield more honey at extraction than those at 18 degrees C. I suggested 20% more honey. Well, we did buy a large warming cabinet and have been using it to keep supers at 30 to 35 degrees C rather than allowing them to cool overnight prior to extraction. So far, the amount of honey we are getting is 16% more per super than when we previously extracted honey that had cooled to room temperature. The honey warming cabinet will pay for itself in one season. It may seem to be a considerable outlay, but for us, it’s really worth every penny. If you are good at building things, you could probably make something similar, or even an entire warm-room, for less money.

Raw Honey

Oh, and for those worried about it not being ‘raw honey’ the temperature inside the brood nest of a bee hive is about 34 degrees C. On that subject, when Odysea Ltd won their case against trading standards, and the judge allowed them to label their honey ‘raw’, it transpired that they heat honey to 40 degrees C during processing, and run it through a 300 micron filter. That’s pretty much what I do, but I prefer not to call mine ‘raw’. When a customer clearly desperately wants to hear the word ‘raw’ I will explain that there is no legal definition of raw, but that mine probably is, by whatever definition they might come up with, and that it is certainly unpasteurised.

That’s all, folks – I hope you found some of that interesting. I am returning to honey extraction tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. We are treating big colonies with Formic Pro and nucleus colonies with Thymovar. After the big cleanup of the honey processing room, our attention will turn to making some late season nucs and re-queening some colonies. Before you know it, I’ll be shouting “bah, humbug” at carol singers. Looking forward to Spring already!