When I was a child, obesity was much less common than it is now, and we ate things like lard. In fact, lardy cake was a delicious treat that I used to purchase on a Saturday from a baker shop in Brockenhurst (they still sell it occasionally). We ate bacon and eggs, steak and kidney … Read more
“Keep local bees.” Or, increasingly, “Keep locally adapted bees.” It’s among the most repeated lines in UK beekeeping, usually delivered with the confidence of a law of physics. And to be fair, it often works as advice. Local queens can perform well, and local colonies can overwinter reliably. But the phrase “local bees” is doing … Read more
What the evidence shows, and what it doesn’t Since the late 1990s, varroa resistance has resurfaced repeatedly — Africanised bees, the Gotland survivors, hygienic breeding programmes, and more recently treatment-free narratives — each time framed as a solution, and each time constrained by ecology, genetics, and scale. Talks promise it, social media celebrates it, and … Read more
Honey bees have been around a lot longer than humans, and the way they organise their colonies and their lives seems to work very well for them, even if it sometimes seems a little strange to us. They have a system involving three types of adult bee (the queen, workers, and drones), three types of … Read more
As an editor of a bee farming magazine (called Bee Farmer, would you believe?), former director of BeeCraft, author, blogger, podcaster (sometimes) – you get the picture – I’m always interested in communicating valuable information on keeping honey bees to others. There are many others doing something similar, and probably better. The challenge that we … Read more
After the hard work of harvesting and extracting the summer honey crop, followed by tidying up the resulting sticky mess, it is rather pleasant to have a little break from beekeeping. We add the pungent pads of Formic Pro to brood boxes at the same time as we remove cleared honey supers, and they are … Read more
I used to think that the goal of the Bee Improvement and Bee Breeders Association (BIBBA) is primarily about encouraging beekeepers to raise queens from selected breeder-queens, and thus improve the quality of their stock. I don’t think many people would argue against such a noble cause. It’s in the name of the organisation; if … Read more
“Wild” honey bees have recently been classified as “endangered” in the European Union on the “Red List” of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). This seems to have been based on a paper by Patrick L. Kohl & Benjamin Rutschmann (2025) which is not yet peer-reviewed and seems, to me at least, to … Read more