My Best Yield Yet, and Why I Still Can’t Take New Customers

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 until the spring because I would rather not let any customers down by running out. This is why, bizarre as it may seem to some people, we are not increasing our customer numbers. We need to increase colony numbers, and then honey crop, before committing to supply anybody else. This is quite frustrating because I could easily double our sales if I had the honey.

The Numbers

Despite several problems, we managed to produce a honey crop of 4,500 lb (2.04 t) in 2026, which was mostly summer honey. Spring honey was 22% of that, meaning that 78% of the total came in July and August. We have already sold all the spring honey (gulp) but, as long as sales follow for the next nine months at the same rate, we should just have enough. It’s not ideal; we really need at least six months’ worth of honey in storage at any time because disasters can happen. The answer is to grow colony numbers, which is the plan for next year.

As we went into the winter of 2025 we had 63 production colonies. The average number of colonies in 2025 was 61, and we made 4,540 lb (2.06 t) of honey that year, i.e. 74 lb (34 kg) per colony. This year our average number of production colonies was only 47, due to losses over winter and during the season. The honey crop was about the same, making our yield 96 lb (44 kg) per colony in 2026; our best so far. My friend, Paul Horton, reported that he too had his best season ever: 328 lb (149 kg) per colony! That is insane. He has benefited enormously from (a) the hot weather (b) the SFI crops (Sustainable Farming Incentive) and (c) being an excellent migratory beekeeper.

Going Into Winter

We are taking 54 production colonies into winter (assuming no losses between now and then) along with 16 nice Langstroth nucleus colonies (nucs), headed by great queens, so we should quickly be able to get up to around 63 honey producers next spring, assuming 10% losses over winter. Our over-wintered nucs expand rapidly in the spring and, once promoted to full-sized hives, can produce both a spring and summer crop.

What Went Wrong

The plan is to make further nucs from strong colonies in spring to increase our numbers in 2027. But that was what we tried to do this year, and it went horrendously wrong, sadly. We made plenty of splits in late April and early May this season, but by the end of June most were shaken out, having no queen or a drone laying queen. For me, May was a terrible time for queen mating, and I’m still trying to get my head around it. There were plenty of drones in colonies at that time. There was a period of good mating weather in the last week of May. New virgin queens should have emerged and been ready to mate in that window, but something went wrong. Early to mid-June was quite cool and wet. Virgin queens need to mate within four weeks of emergence, ideally, and of the four weeks available only one had suitable weather – but that should have been enough.

Of course, the nucs that I made up with over-wintered queens were fine. The problem was the ones that had to make their own queen. I suspect that one issue might be newly mated queens returning to the wrong hive, which can happen when they are quite close together (as is often the case for me). I shall be differentiating hive entrances in some cunning, as yet undetermined way, before next spring. I could have sidestepped the issue by buying mated queens in April, but that would have gone against my general wish to use all queens made from my chosen stock, or queens bred in the UK (albeit probably using breeding material from both UK and Europe).

Selling Nucs

On the subject of nucs, I also have a dozen Nationals going into winter for sale next spring. We run Langstroths ourselves, but sell Nationals to others. People are spending eye-watering amounts on nucs, so it seems sensible to take advantage of that. It’s a funny thing, selling nucs. I frequently seem to sell my best bees to complete strangers, and rarely discover their fate. I once sold some bees to a person who decided that they had deformed wing virus (DWV), supported by a photo. It was a photo of a bee that had been squashed on its journey in the car. A couple of years later those bees were dead, no doubt due to levels of varroa and DWV that they did not have when I sold them. Another time, I visited a beekeeper who had bought my bees but complained because the queen (who had been named something like Gertrude) was not laying. The first frame I pulled out was covered in eggs, and had Gertrude there too.

Never-Ending To-Dos

Despite finishing extracting, there’s plenty of work still to do. We need to use the Apimelter, currently full of wax cappings, to tap off the remaining honey and then fire up the temperature to get the beeswax. This will be cleaned up by filtration through cheesecloth and either sold to a cosmetics producer or turned into beautiful candles which nobody will buy. OK, some will sell, but to do well with candles you have to really commit. I’m too lazy to do all that fancy packaging stuff, but it’s what’s needed for most people to buy them, presumably as Christmas gifts.

Then we have the joyous task of cleaning up our extractor room and all the equipment. Once that is done, I get a feeling of great righteousness, but the cleaning process is not my favourite beekeeping task. I used to think that extracting honey was the worst beekeeping job, but now I think it is the endless cleaning and sterilising. Especially buckets. There are always stacks of them waiting to be cleaned. Speaking of stacks, I store my honey buckets on pallets in my store room (food-safe premises) stacked three buckets high. I have seen people stack them five or six buckets high, but that feels unsafe to me.

Next, we need to go to each apiary to do the final inspections of the year, and to remove the Formic Pro pads that they were given a couple of weeks ago. This is when we can mark and clip any queens who are not marked and clipped, check on stores, and combine or shake out anything dodgy (by which I mean, not queen right, or queen not performing). Some feeding may be needed, but usually for us, this is mainly on nucs rather than hives. If we are giving hives a winter feed of syrup, it’s typically one 14 kg can of syrup via an Ashforth-type feeder made of polystyrene, which can stay on over the winter. Nucs often require regular top-ups from now until the end of October to get them to a good weight for the winter.

Even after this, we have tidying up to do. Every apiary needs to be left neat and tidy for the winter, and any rubbish or old equipment left there must be cleared away and burned or taken to the dump. There’s always something lying about that “I’ll sort out next time I’m here,” but I don’t.

Finally, there’s making plans for the season ahead, and making useful items such as clearer boards, double-screened boards, and ekes. Oh, and ordering frames from Murray at Denrosa Apiaries (we get them made up with the wax foundation installed). I also generally look at the expensive beekeeping equipment that I could buy, and probably don’t buy it. Like an uncapping machine. We are going to build a base for our extractors following the example of David Evans, using casters instead of having them screwed into the floor. We’ll see how that goes.

October BBKA News

In other news, I saw some interesting snippets in the BBKA News (Oct ’26). Paudel and colleagues found that the best diameter of cup for queen rearing is 9 mm, although at 10 mm the bees add more royal jelly. The 9 mm cups produced larger queens who performed better than the others (larger thorax, larger abdomen and bigger brood areas), and acceptance of grafts was highest. I’ll have to look at the paper to see what they did. Actually, I just had a peep, and it was in two hot lowland districts of Nepal. That is a very different climate and probably different stock. But they concluded that, “This research indicates 10 mm queen cell cups are suitable to optimize royal jelly production while 9 mm queen cell cups are suitable for quality queen production.”

There were plenty of letters about the article on winter losses which had appeared in the August BBKA News, including one from Jo Widdicombe in Cornwall, who I visited last year. He was open about losses of 50% (he no longer treats his bees, and has not done so for seven years). He still holds on to his belief that the only way to sustainable beekeeping is to take the hit, keep breeding from the survivors, and eventually resistance will proliferate. However, he combines this with a plea for UK beekeepers to stop importing queens because hybridisation causes unpredictable breeding outcomes. Luckily for him, his bees are on an isolated peninsula. I think Jo is a great bloke, and his bees are nice too, but we always disagree on one thing. To me, the evidence is there to show that UK bees are, in the main, so mixed up genetically that the “getting back to the native honey bee” ship has well and truly sailed and disappeared over the horizon. I also don’t believe that many commercial beekeepers would tolerate 50% losses for very long before they go bust or reach for the varroacides.

And Finally

Question: has anybody worked out the optimal number of 30 lb (14 kg) buckets of honey to safely stack in a storeroom? Maximise use of space while minimising disaster, such as puncturing lids or buckets falling to the floor …

That concludes this update from a beekeeping walrus. I hope your season went well, and that you have healthy bees going into the winter – preferably treated for varroa and well provisioned with stores. That didn’t use to be a controversial statement!