18/03/2026
Introducing the first in a new series of interviews with our wonderful volunteers, so you can see the faces bee-hind the charity! 🐝
Meet Robin Dartington, Founder of Buzzworks and Head Beekeeper 🍯
How did start Buzzworks and how long have you been volunteering?
In 2007, I was ‘one year nominal president’ of Hertfordshire Bee Keeping Association (BKA) and so received the offer from North Herts Council of a free site for beekeeping on the edge of allotments. With friends, I collected 2007 signatures on a petition to the then Hitchin Council for a £25,000 grant and to local companies who at that time offered grants to mitigate dislike of open waste sites. All grants totalled £70,000, enough for hedging, the cabin, the shelter, the bee shed, the toilet, eight hives and eight colonies!
What is your role within Buzzworks?
I established BAH (Buzzworks Association Hitchin) as an ‘educational charity’, which I ‘chaired’ until retiring in my 80’s as ‘president’ and ‘HoneyWorks beekeeper’.
What is your favourite thing about volunteering for Buzzworks?
I am essentially a beekeeper rather than educator - interested in respecting bees own needs rather than exploiting them for honey production. Well kept bees will however also produce honey as it is their nature is to fill whatever cavity they inhabit! My interest nevertheless is to develop beekeeping practices that respect - so far as possible - the natural life of a honeybee colony.
What would you say to someone who might be considering beekeeping?
Try to spend a full year - better two - before getting your own bees. Finding a colony of your own has died, due to a mistake, is very discouraging - and expensive!
What is your favourite quality or fact about bees?
That bees are a far older life form than us - that we should respect and conserve so that they stretch far into the future after we have destroyed humanity by nuclear war. (Inevitable!).
