We would like to take this opportunity to wish all our customers a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

We have a limited number of third quality British cedar hive parts available. You can collect these from the following branches; Rand, Stockbridge, Windsor & Devon.

While the temperatures are so low, we will be holding orders with wax sheets on back, to prevent breakages.

Our Winter Sale will be going live online on Thursday 28th December and over the phone on Tuesday 2nd January.

If you are stuck for Christmas present ideas, don't forget we offer gift vouchers, including e-vouchers that can be emailed so no need to rely on the post!

This week we have had Laurence from Black Mountain Honey visit us at Head Office to have a look around the factory and grounds. Look out for his videos on his YouTube channel.

Equipment Focus

Thorne Smokers & Smoker Boxes

The Empire smokers we sell are made at our factory here in Lincolnshire. You can choose from copper, galvanised or stainless steel, and they come in two sizes.

The smoker box is the perfect addition to your kit. A sturdy steel powder coated box made to safely store your smoker, even straight after use. The smoker and tool box stores all your apiary tools, includng bee brushes, hive tools and queen rearing accesories.

These will make great gifts for any beekeepers in your life!

New In!

Themed Coloured

Candle Sheet Packs

Following many requests, we have added four new mixed candle sheet packs to our website; Summer, Woodland, Blues & Purples, and Pastels.

Each pack has ten 16" x 8" sized sheets of coloured beeswax in a variety of colours.

Price £21.70

Ask the Expert

Record Keeping

There is actually very little you have to record for beekeeping purposes. In comparison with other types of livestock, beekeeping is much less monitored and moderated by the relevant authorities (for good or bad…)

THE LAW

By law you do have to keep records of any medicines you have treated your bees with for five years irrespective of whether or not the colony is no longer in your possession or has died during that period.

When a veterinary medicinal product is bought beekeepers must, at the time, record:

• The name of the product and the batch number
• The date of acquisition
• The quantity acquired
• The name and address of the supplier

When administering the medicine, beekeepers must record on a medicine record card:

• The name of the product
• The date of administration
• The quantity administered
• The withdrawal period
• The identification of the animals treated i.e., hive number, apiary

A beekeeper who disposes of any or the entire veterinary medicinal product other than by treating a colony must record:

• The date of disposal
• The quantity of product involved
• How and where it was disposed of

A simple form can be found by typing in VETERINARY MEDICINE ADMINISTRATION RECORD into your search bar online.

YOUR OPTIONS

Depending on how many hives you have and how good your memory is, you may want to keep some form of record to keep track of your bees. If you have just one or two hives, you might find that you can remember from one inspection to the next what was happening in each hive and what you did/need to do. However, if you have more than just a couple, making a quick note of a few choice things may save you time, effort and stress in the long run.

Observations you may want to include:

• Date
• Weather / temperature
• Apiary / colony number
• Did you see the queen? Is she marked? If so what colour? Is she a particular strain? Other noticeable characteristics.
• Is there brood at all stages? i.e., sealed brood, open brood both young and old, eggs.
• Were there queen cells?  If so, how many, what stage were they at? Which frame/s were they on? This can save a lot of time later!
• If there were frames of brood and stores – if so, how many of each?
• Do they have enough room to expand? Do they need new frames or a super putting on?
• What is their health like? Signs of varroa? Good brood pattern? Brood looking healthy?
• Are they friendly or do they seem aggressive? This could be done on a sliding scale from 1-10 for example.
• Do they need feeding? Is there a honey flow on?
• Notes section – this is helpful if there is anything else you think needs noting down that you might not remember next time e.g., there is a hole in one of the boxes that needs fixing or that there is a lot of propolis.

With a bit of initial work to create a record keeping table, most of this can be noted down with one letter answers, a tick, cross or a number. This keeps it a simple process and standardised throughout all your hives. It is then easy to look down and see which hives need what and also gives you a good idea about which apiaries are providing well for your bees, which colonies are consistently aggressive and which ones are looking to swarm etc. The BBKA provides a simple Hive Recording Table on their website if you wanted to print that out and use it instead of making your own.

Basically, you can record what is important to you. If you know you only go out on nice sunny days, you might decide that you don’t need to record temperature or weather. If you don’t mind about the temperament of the bees as long as they are producing honey, then you might not want to bother with the temperament section. Equally, if you know that you get tired of switching between sticky hive tool and increasingly sticky pen and paper, you might decide to have the absolute bare minimum on a record page to reduce the time you have to spend transferring honey, propolis and wax onto your paper.

It really depends on what you are trying to achieve with your bees and how you want to look after them. Of course, it all hinges on your memory – I’m sure there are people out there who can remember all of these things for all of their colonies but for the rest of us, pen and paper are our friends.

November

This month has been mostly sorting out the hives and preparing for next season. We have been checking the stands that support the hives are sound and any that aren’t we have levelled up or changed for a better stand. Sometimes over the season hives start to lean a little, especially where we have really wet, boggy ground and the slabs begin to sink slightly. Sometimes all this needs is a small readjustment, but sometimes, as the photo shows, it can be the stand itself giving way, so in these cases it is better to replace with a less weathered one than to risk it toppling over.

We also fed the last of the liquid feed and will now be feeding fondant if necessary. The plan this year is to leave the feeders on as it is always a big job taking them off, storing them, getting them back out in spring and putting them all back on the hives. We’re hoping this way we can avoid all that extra work and put our efforts into other areas. Before feeding any fondant, we will be hefting the hives to double check they actually need feeding. If they don’t, then great!

Mouseguards have gone on the front entrances of some hives this month. We have only put some on because other hives already have the wasp out entrance blocks inserted, which we actually find very useful for acting not only as a deterrent for wasps but for mice too.

With this recent cold snap, we are starting to look ahead to doing a winter oxalic acid treatment, and if the temperatures stay low for long enough, we will be looking to do this sooner rather than later. The main other job for next month will be to keep sorting through equipment and planning how best to achieve our goals for next season (very long process!).

As you know, the Asian hornet is alive and well with 76 confirmed sightings of Asian hornet in the UK in 2023, and 83 nests destroyed since 2016. In response to this threat, The National Honey Show invited Nigel Semmence to the show to talk about the current situation with Asian hornet in the UK.  He covered the historic perspective as well as summarising the current response and details about what to expect from the ongoing science being conducted by Fera Science Ltd on behalf of Defra. 

This lecture is now available to view:

You have a brilliant opportunity, right now, to support our spectacular show's first class educational lecture programme for beekeepers and apiculture, with its continued availability, worldwide, on our YouTube Channel.

The National Honey Show's Christmas BigGive Campaign week is 'LIVE' now! For the next two days, any donations received will be doubled! Don't forget to donate by noon Tuesday 5th December via the platform: https://donate.biggive.org/campaign/a056900002RXvpcAAD
We are grateful to our campaign champions, The Reed Foundation, as well as all our show supporters.

Meanwhile the committee are already looking forwards to 2024 when we will bring you another great show at Sandown Park Racecourse, Esher, Surrey, UK: 24th to 26th October 2024.
Look forward to seeing you there.

Bees for Development – Big Give Christmas Challenge 2023

With just a couple of few days left in our Big Give Christmas Challenge week of fundraising - why not extend a gift to families and communities who can benefit from the good thing’s bees bring? We want to help many young people in Ethiopia, who need the sustainable income that bees can bring. Young people like Tagegn have learned to keep bees with us and are now harnessing their power to create a rural livelihood and save for their future. Right now, any gift you can make to Bees for Development will be DOUBLED through The Big Give. Today, up until noon Tuesday 5 December, every £1 you give will be doubled. Our fundraising week is halfway through, and You can HELP make double the difference today! Please help us to train more young people - beekeeping provides them with a livelihood for life.

Bee Good Gifts from Bees for Development - Gift Cards that Gift back!

Looking for a unique ethical and sustainable gift this Christmas? With Bees for Development’s gift cards, you can help alleviate poverty and protect biodiversity whilst sharing a most precious gift with loved ones this Christmas. With your support we can continue to raise awareness and inform about bee friendly practices, encouraging everyone to help protect bees and the environment. The card can be sent to you, or directly to your friend or family member. The card includes a space for a personal message.  Choose to give £15, £25, £50 and £100 all available on line.

More news of our work - Bees for Development Ghana partners with Ghana National Fire Service to safeguard Afram Plains beekeepers from bushfires 

FIRE – whilst used and valued by rural communities the world over – frequent, severe and out-of-control bush fires are hugely damaging for people, for property, for wildlife and the environment.  In Ghana, where forest fires have become increasingly severe due to tree felling for charcoal production, Bees for Development Ghana have been running Forest Fire Management training workshops since October and have already reached: 18 communities, 706 participants of which 321 were female and 385 male, you can read more following the link below.

Image credit: Briana Marie Forgie with Photographers Without Borders

Book Review

‘Local Queens are Best

How to simply rear your own’

by Bruce Henderson Smith

"A rewarding skill, globally relevant, and a most readable how to do it text."

Northern Bee Books (1st Edition 2023)

72 pages

£12.95

Wherever several are gathered together to pursue a common hobby or pastime, there are always those fellows – and it is usually fellas – who use their hobby as a free pass to buy all the gadgets, accessories, extras and gizmos that their hobby blesses them with. Your reviewer has been no exception – his collection of vintage Whitworth socket sets is particularly expansive. However, if your beekeeping falls in that camp, with catalogues of Apideas, grafting tools and Jenter cages, this is not the book for you.

The title says it all: this is a book for those of us who have a colony with a benign matriarch, whose offspring are gentle to handle, healthy and productive. This is how to continue her line and improve the other colonies in our care, using the minimum of fuss, equipment or expense. Ultimately, this improvement benefits all beekeepers in the neighbourhood, as the density of well-bred drones increases in the area.

Bruce gives the reader a quick refresher of some basic lifecycle knowledge, then shares his method using nothing more sophisticated than a diary, a pencil, a drop of light syrup and a nuc box – or even just a spare brood box and a dummy board. It’s a personal step through getting the bees to do what they do naturally, which is for the nurse bees to react to the loss of the queen by taking the newest of fertilised eggs and feeding them royal jelly. Nurse bees are collected using a double shake – first a gentle shake to encourage the foragers to fly off and then a stronger shake to dislodge the nurse bees from the brood they are focussed upon. Bruce also sets out expectations for the process – it may require a couple of attempts, it may require good fortune regarding the weather and it may result in a few more queens than you personally need, but there are always neighbouring beekeepers that will be grateful for your excess.

Richly illustrated with the author’s photographs, there’s a first-hand commentary on what to look for and when just to trust the nurse bees to know their job. Highly recommended for any beekeeper, even with modest experience, who wishes to improve their stock.

Book review by Geoff Hardman (Editor, Gwenyn Kernow magazine, CBKA)

Thursday 28th December November - Winter Sale starts online at 7am

Tuesday 2nd January - Winter Sale starts over the phone at 9am

R A N D

Monday 24th to Wednesday 27th December - CLOSED

Thursday 28th to Friday 29th December - 10am to 4pm

Saturday 30th December to Monday 1st - CLOSED

Tuesday 2nd January - OPEN AS USUAL

W I N D S O R

Thursday 21st December to

Monday 1st January - CLOSED

Tuesday 2nd January - OPEN AS USUAL

S C O T L A N D

Thursday 21st December to

Tuesday 2nd January - CLOSED

Wednesday 3rd January - OPEN AS USUAL

S T O C K B R I D G E

Thursday 21st December to

Monday 1st January - CLOSED

Tuesday 2nd January - OPEN AS USUAL

D E V O N

Thursday 21st December to

Monday 1st January - CLOSED

Tuesday 2nd January - OPEN AS USUAL