Fernhill Heath Honey

02/06/2026

31/05/2026

🐝 Weekly Hive Inspection – Week 7

This week’s inspection was brought forward a little as we were travelling home to see family, so we were in the hive early in the morning before hitting the road. Remember its always on the bees schedule, so we must carry out our inspections around about the 7/8 day mark to catch swarm cells.

The main hive is much the same as last week: 7 frames of brood, with the supers continuing to fill — a little slower because of the warm, dry weather. As lovely as sunshine is, dry conditions mean plants generally produce less nectar, so progress naturally dips.
With nothing dramatic happening in this hive, this week’s video is a time‑lapse of us working quickly through all four hives. Some of the other hives are giving us plenty to think about in terms of management.

The swarm we collected a few weeks ago is incredibly strong — but they’re also showing signs they want to replace their queen, as we’re seeing queen cells.
These aren’t the position or quantity we’d expect for swarm cells, so we’ll cover that difference another time.
For now, we’re simply removing the cells and seeing whether they settle down, as the queen is laying beautifully and doesn’t need replacing.
To knock them back a little we took one of their frames that has been fully laid up and give it to a weaker hive to help boost their numbers and give them an empty frame in return.

One of the other hives, headed by a queen who is at least three years old, is also preparing to replace her.
She’s the mother of two of our current colonies, and she’s likely nearing the end of her natural lifespan.
So we have a decision to make:
• Do we let the bees replace her naturally?
• Or do we intervene and use one of her daughters from this year to take over?

At the moment, we’re leaning towards combining one of the new queen’s hive with the older queen’s colony, then moving the old queen into a nuc to draw out some fresh frames — which we need anyway.

This manipulation is likely something we’ll cover in the next few week’s updates.

27/05/2026

Watch a new worker bee emerge and start her short but invaluable life in the hive.

25/05/2026

🐝 Weekly Hive Inspection – Week 6

This week’s inspection should be much the same as last week’s, no surprises, no issues, and a quick check for space, health, and progress.
In fact, that’s hopefully how the rest of the season will look for this hive now until we start preparing for winter, but you never know what will happen.

We’re also keeping an eye on how the bees behave as the new queen’s offspring begin to emerge. We don’t tolerate bad‑tempered bees, but hopefully we will have no issues.

And yes… I always tell people to wear proper protection, but you’ll notice I’m in shorts, and Kerry’s in even shorter ones. It’s been a glorious weekend, and it gets hot in a bee suit!

🐝 Checking the supers

As we open the hive, we take a quick look at how the supers are filling.
They’re not fully capped yet, but the bees are bringing nectar in steadily and drying it down nicely. The honey looks ripe and not too “wet”.

If nectar is flowing strongly, bees often delay capping, they prioritise processing incoming nectar over sealing finished honey.
When it’s time to harvest, we’ll check the moisture content anyway to make sure it’s below the safe threshold.

🐝 Down into the brood box

We remove the queen excluder, the slotted screen that stops the queen from entering the supers and laying eggs in the honey we’ll eventually harvest.

Then it’s a quick run through the brood frames:
• Laying pattern looks good
• Food stores are ample
• One frame is a bit wonky — drawn slightly skewed, making one side of the cells unusable. We’ll replace that later to give them better space to work with.

Otherwise, the bees are friendly, calm, and not remotely interested in us or our bare legs.

🐝 Queen’s progress

This week the queen has laid in 7 of the 11 brood frames, up from 4 frames last week, a lovely sign of a young queen building momentum.

With everything looking healthy and well‑organised, it’s time to close them up and let them get on with their work in the sunshine.

20/05/2026

🐝 Happy World Bee Day!

Today we’re celebrating all the bees that keep the UK buzzing, not just honey bees like the ones we keep.

Here’s the breakdown of our amazing bee diversity:

🐝 Solitary Bees (~245–250 species) — around 90% of all UK bees. They don’t live in colonies or make honey; they nest alone in hollow stems, dead wood, or tiny tunnels in the ground.

🐝 Bumblebees (24 species) — the familiar, fluffy pollinators that live in small colonies and are some of our most important wild pollinators.

🐝 Honey Bees (1 species) — Apis mellifera, the only honey bee species in the UK, and almost all are managed by beekeepers.

And let’s not forget their waspy cousins, the UK has 9,000+ species of wasps, most of them tiny, solitary, and essential for natural pest control.

Every one of these insects plays a part in keeping our ecosystems healthy.

So today, plant a flower, leave a patch of garden wild, or simply appreciate the pollinators around you.

17/05/2026

Weekly Hive Inspection – Week 5

This week should be a nice straightforward inspection — hopefully no drama, no surprises, and no excitement at all.
With a brand‑new queen in the hive, we certainly don’t expect any swarm preparations.

Our main jobs today are to check:
• Queen’s laying pattern — making sure she’s laying consistently and not dropping drone brood into worker cells, which can indicate poor mating. Finding the queen isn’t essential during a normal inspection; if we see eggs, we know she’s been there within the last 3 days.
• Space in the brood box — making sure the brood box isn’t getting clogged with nectar as they convert it into honey, and adding supers if needed.
• Signs of disease — bees are livestock, and some conditions are notifiable to DEFRA, so we always keep an eye out.
• General colony build‑up — how they’re expanding, storing food, and drawing comb.
• Temperament — as the new queen’s offspring start to emerge, we’ll be watching behaviour closely. We can’t keep bees with poor temperament; it makes inspections miserable for everyone.

🐝 Checking the supers
A quick peek in the supers as we dismantle the hive shows they’re bringing in nectar and drying it down nicely. Some cells are already being capped, and there’s still plenty of room — so we continue down to the brood box.

🐝 Into the brood box
As expected, the outer frames are full of food stores — honey and pollen ready for the nurse bees to feed the larvae.
Moving inward, we see polished cells — shiny, cleaned-out cells prepared for the queen to lay in — but no eggs in those particular frames yet.
Then we reach a frame of brood.
The pattern looks good:
• nice biscuit‑coloured cappings
• frames laid up neatly
• larvae looking healthy, pearly white, and well-fed
• no signs of disease
The next few frames show more of the same… and then we spot the queen herself.

🐝 Brood in all stages
We’ve got 4 frames of BIAS — Brood In All Stages (eggs, larvae, and capped brood).
The queen has clearly settled into her role and is working her way steadily through the frames.
With everything looking healthy and well organised, there’s nothing more to do today except reassemble the hive and leave them to it.

12/05/2026

Spot the Queen

So at the weekend we asked if you could spot the new queen. Here's the freeze frame again.

Have a good look and then you can check the comments for the answer.

This is an easy one as a lot of the bees where out foraging so the frame isn't fully covered in bees.

10/05/2026

🐝 Weekly Hive Inspection – Week 4

This week starts with a big question:
Did the bees draw emergency queen cells on the frame of eggs we gave them last week?
We added that frame because we didn’t see the new queen or any eggs, so today we’re straight in to check it.

🐝 No queen cells… so what does that mean?
If the bees thought they were queenless, they would have immediately started building queen cells on that frame.
But they haven't

That tells us the colony believes they already have a queen.
So
• Was she out on her mating flight when we actually went in the hive?
• Did she made it back from her mating flight and we simply missed her last week and she wasn't ready to lay yet?
• Did she make it back and somethings wrong with her so she can't lay?

Time to go through the frames properly and find out.

🐝 Four frames in… and we have eggs AND larvae!
Brilliant news, we’ve got a newly mated queen, and she’s laying really well.
Now the mission is to find her so we can get her marked.

On the very next frame she appears — can you spot her in the freeze frame?
I'll drop the freeze frame in the comments.

Out comes the queen clip, and we mark her with this year’s colour: white.
When we place her back on the frames, the bees immediately gather around her to clean, feed, and fuss over her.
A new queen’s pheromones are strong, and the colony responds quickly to her presence.

🐝 No need to check the rest
Now that we’ve seen her, marked her, and confirmed she’s laying, we don’t need to disturb the rest of the brood nest.
We’ll let her settle in and get back to work.

🐝 Quick look at the supers
In the supers (the smaller boxes on top), we can see the bees starting to cap honey.
Bees only cap honey once the water content is low enough that it won’t ferment — usually below 20% (heather honey is the exception, but that’s a whole different story).

If the weather stays kind and the forage keeps flowing, we might have honey ready to extract in just a few weeks!

07/05/2026

🐝 Eggs and Cells

It can be surprisingly difficult to spot eggs during an inspection — and it’s no wonder.
A worker bee cell is only about 5mm wide (give or take half a millimetre), and a bee egg is just 1.2mm long. When it’s first laid, it stands upright in the bottom of the cell like a tiny grain of rice.

We sometimes use a bright torch to help us see them, but even that can be tricky through a veil.

And yes… in the photo you’ll see two eggs in one cell.
That’s completely normal for a newly mated queen who’s just getting into the rhythm of laying. The workers will remove the extra egg so the developing bee has the space it needs.

Another little glimpse into the tiny, precise world inside the hive.

05/05/2026

🐝 Queen Marking – What We’re Doing and Why

Hi all! Here’s a quick little video of us marking the queen from the swarm we collected the other week.

We use a queen‑marking cage that lets us gently press the queen against a mesh top so we can dab a tiny dot of water‑based paint onto her thorax. It’s quick, safe and keeps her protected while we work.

We do this for a few reasons.

🐝 Easier to spot during inspections
A queen can be unsurprisingly hard to find in a hive of thousands.
A small coloured dot means we can locate her in seconds, keeping the hive open for less time and reducing stress on the colony.

🐝 The colour tells us her age
Queens can live up to 5 years, while workers only last a few weeks in summer 6 weeks or so by the time they start foraging).
In the UK, queen‑marking colours are standardised, so one glance tells us exactly which year she was born.

🐝 Helps us understand colony behaviour
If a hive suddenly changes temperament, stops laying, or starts building queen cells, knowing the queen’s age helps us work out what’s going on.

🐝 Safe, quick, and effective
Some beekeepers hold the queen by a leg, others use different cages — this method just works best for us.
Once marked, we give the paint a few seconds to dry, then place her gently back on the frames where she happily runs down into the hive.

A tiny dot of paint… but it makes a big difference in managing a healthy, well‑understood colony.