A mother-daughter beekeeping adventure
Bee facts, science, and everything you never knew you needed to know about bees.
A Buzzword Post There is a specific kind of beekeeping day where the sky looks at you, then looks at your hive, and makes a decision on your behalf. Today was that day. The BBC had been threatening thundery showers since Wednesday. By Saturday lunchtime the air had gone heavy and the bees were flying … Read more
The Buzzword | Learning Together | March 2026 There is a moment in every beekeeper’s education when they discover that something they thought was their own idea already has a name, a method, and about seventy years of history behind it. This post is about one of those moments. After adding our second brood box … Read more
Right. So. Queen rearing. If you’d asked me six months ago what I thought about raising my own queens, I would have laughed nervously and changed the subject. We’re still trying to keep our single colony alive through winter, and here we are taking notes at a lecture about breeding bees. Classic overachievers, us. But … Read more
A new research paper reveals that honey bees may be running their own viral surveillance system. We break down what recapping behaviour means, why resistant colonies do it better, and what Bee Girl thinks it sounds like (spoiler: a sick bay).
So last week, I went to this talk by Jonathan Getty from the Native Irish Honey Bee Society. We figured we’d sit in the back, nod along to words we didn’t understand, and maybe pick up one or two useful tips. Instead? My brain is now completely full of queen rearing information and I have … Read more
Our bees built comb in the roof. They needed more space. So we added a second brood box — but not before standing in the garden overthinking it for ten minutes.
What we learned from Stephen Martin’s incredible beekeeping adventures Right, so here’s the thing about being complete beekeeping beginners: when you get the chance to listen to someone like Stephen Martin—an actual bee scientist who’s spent decades studying bees around the world—you sit up straight, you take notes, and you try not to feel too … Read more
A Bee Happy Honey Deep Dive Okay, so Mum here. I recently sat through a lecture by Professor Stephen Martin about varroa mites, viruses, and how bees adapt to both. And friends? My brain is officially melted. In the best possible way. I walked in expecting the usual doom and gloom about colony collapse and … Read more
Right, so full disclosure before we go any further: this is our first year keeping bees. Our FIRST year. We got them in spring, we’ve been learning as we go (with approximately zero idea what we’re doing), and we’re currently in our first winter praying we haven’t killed them all — and nervously second-guessing our … Read more
Year two at the Ulster Beekeepers Association Conference – how Mum and Bee Girl divided and conquered, what we learned about native Irish bees, chemical-free beekeeping, and why the best learning happens after the lecture.