Skep
We keep bees for the honey the hedge gives us, and sell what the year leaves over.
Single-origin seasonal honey pressed from one flow at a time, over-wintered nucleus colonies, and mated queens raised from our own stock. Nothing blended, nothing bought in.
The colony year
This is one of our colonies, modelled day by day: the queen’s laying, the twenty-one days in the cell, two different lifespans, and what the hedge is giving on any given morning. Drag through the year. Then make something go wrong and watch where it surfaces — which is rarely where it happened.
Cut-away · one colony Clustered
Bees in the box Dashed: bees actually out working
Winter
Nothing is asleep. The cluster is a muscle, shivering, eating through what we left it.
There is no brood for most of it, so the colony cannot replace a single bee it loses. What is in the box in December is what has to reach March. We do not open hives; we heft them from behind, and the ones that feel light get fondant and a note in the book.
Spring
The colony is now in a race with its own mortality, and it starts the race behind.
Every bee alive in March was born the previous autumn and is running out of time. The queen has to replace them faster than they die, on willow and blackthorn alone, in weather that can shut the hedge for a fortnight. This is where the year is won: a colony that is not strong by the third week of May cannot take the flow when it comes.
The flow
A fortnight of lime, and a colony that was ready for it.
The main flow is not long. Clover carries the middle of it and lime finishes it, and between them is the June gap — a fortnight when the rape is over, the clover has not started, and a heavy colony can starve with supers on. The bees working it were laid in May. That is the whole of the argument for not letting them swarm.
Harvest
We take the crop, and then we stop thinking about honey and start thinking about March.
The balsam finishes, the crop comes off, and the only thing that matters afterwards is the September brood. Those bees never forage. They carry fat reserves, live five months instead of six weeks, and they are the colony that opens next spring. Treat late and you lose them; treat on time and you have not lost anything yet.
Honey, bees, and a day at the hive
We sell three things and we run out of all of them. Honey goes by the flow it came from; bees go out as full nucleus colonies, never as packages; queens are raised here and mated here.
Single-origin honey
Extracted flow by flow and never blended — blackthorn, rape, hawthorn, clover, lime, balsam, ivy. Each one tastes of the fortnight it came from.
340g jar · from £8.50Over-wintered nucs
Six frames of brood, bees and stores on our own comb, with a laying queen already through a winter. Collected from the yard in April and May.
6-frame nucleus · £235Mated queens
Raised from our calmest, most frugal stock and open-mated over the hill. Marked, clipped on request, posted or collected from June.
Mated queen · £48A day at the hive
Six people, one apiary, a full day in a suit with your hands in a colony. For people thinking about keeping bees and for beekeepers in their second year who want to stop guessing.
Full day · £110