A mother-daughter beekeeping adventure
A real hive inspection from 24th April 2026. Bee Girl ran the whole thing. Mum worried about chalk brood. It was a drone larva. Six frames of solid brood and a lot of optimism about this year’s honey.
BEE HAPPY HONEY | The Bee Garden | May The hedgerows are alive with blossom. Your colony is at its most ambitious. And somewhere in all this abundance, there is a problem waiting to catch you out. May is the month that beekeepers talk about all year. The blossom is out. The hedgerows are white … Read more
Last Saturday afternoon was warm, still, and sunny. A rare thing around here. We suited up, opened the hive for a quick look, and Bee Girl quietly asked if she could borrow my phone. She does not often ask for it. Usually I am the one pressing buttons and she is the one tending to … Read more
A spring varroa board count in County Antrim, a gust of wind at exactly the wrong moment, and what we learned about mite monitoring when the week’s debris ends up scattered across the apiary gravel.
It is hailing outside. Not drizzling. Not “a bit damp.” Hailing. In April. In Northern Ireland. So today we are not opening the hive — and here is why that is absolutely the right call.
April in the bee garden: willow, dandelion, and why the scruffiest corner of your garden might be doing more for your bees than anything you have ever planted.
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