The Honeybees of Honeydale Farm

Mar 05, 2025

The apiary was the very first ‘development’ at Honeydale Farm, now home to FarmED. It was established long before the conference barn and Cafe had even been granted planning permission, long before the creation of the natural flood management, heritage orchard, kitchen garden and crop rotation. 

Of course Honeydale Farm had to have honeybees! But since the 107 acres have become a regenerative demonstration farm it goes deeper than that. There’s a natural synergy between regenerative agriculture and beekeeping, as Tony Yarrow, a key member of what is affectionately called the FarmED Bee Team, explains. 

The Synergy Between Regen Ag and Beekeeping 

‘If you imagine conventional agriculture, with a thousand acre prairie growing mainly cereals with no hedges, it’s an artificial, dead landscape effectively, where there’s nothing for bees to forage, except for four weeks of the year when the oilseed rape is in flower. Bees would starve for the other eleven months of the year. Today's modern cornfield might as well be a car park as far as bees are concerned, because it's not like in the olden days when there were poppies and all kinds of flowers in the hedgerows and meadows. They're all sprayed off. So the only option is migratory beekeeping, where the bees are moved onto the rape and then back off to somewhere else where there’s forage for the other eleven months. But bees don't like being moved, it’s very disruptive. If there's any sort of disease it flares up, the bees have to reorient themselves, the queen stops laying and it sets them back a long way. 

‘This is why regenerative agriculture is so brilliant, because the system leaves space for nature, allowing plants to grow that provide forage for bees right through the season. In late January and February, out come the snowdrops, when there are almost no insect pollinators. Then you've got the crocuses, pussy willow and dandelions and the heritage orchard just over the hedge from our apiary. That takes the bees right through to the ivy in October. So any day that they can fly, there's forage for them right there. Flowers have learned over billions of years to flower at different times of the year so they're not all competing with each other. The natural time for a plant to flower is in the summer when the days are long and warm and there are more insects. But if they all did that, there would be too much competition. So the snowdrops are very brave, because they will flower in January when there are insects, the days are short, but there's no competition. A snowdrop looks delicate but in fact it’s tough as old boots; they grow under hedges where there's competition from the roots of the hedge bushes and no sunlight. Over millions of years flowers have worked it out, that they should share the year between them. And regenerative agriculture simply restores that whole ecology.

‘There’s a commercial beekeeper in Wales, David Wainwright, who gets crops that most people wouldn't dream of. His average is over 100lbs of honey a year and the national average is 23lbs a year but he doesn't do very much to his bees. As time goes on he has intervened less and less. He has visited FarmED because he believes the link between beekeeping and regenerative agriculture is that in beekeeping, the more we know, the more we realise that bees should be left alone to do their own thing. And with regenerative agriculture, soil should be left alone too. The more you interfere with the soil, the poorer and less fertile it becomes. If you plough it and break it up and harrow it and chuck chemicals on it, you end up with something that isn't very fertile at all. So regenerative agriculture is good for the bees because the mix of forage is so abundant.’

The honey is incredible too, says Tony, with so many different elements in it. ‘It’s never the same two years running because there are certain flowers that will give a lot of honey some years but less in others. It has to be warm and still for clover for instance; it doesn’t like windy conditions. It can give you a massive honey crop or it can give you nothing at all. Blackberry tends to be very reliable. You tend to get honey from blackberry every year. So some years there'll be blackberry and clover and chicory and sainfoin but other years it'll be a different mix.’

The Early Days of the Honeydale Farm Apiary 

Building the first hives!

It was Paul Totterdell who first established the apiary at Honeydale. Paul is the Director of Cotswold Grass Seeds and came to beekeeping from an unusual angle. 

‘I studied computer science at Uni and that’s partly what has led to my fascination with bees. Bees are like little robots, all contributing to a ‘hive mind’. A hive comprises lots of simple, little beings or components, that in themselves exhibit only simple behaviour but when they all interact with each other they become greater than the sum of their parts and produce unexpected outcomes, otherwise known as ‘emergent behaviour’.  Often this emergent behaviour can be unpredictable but can also be extremely impressive and appear to be of a higher intelligence, for example, the way bees protect the Queen, swarm in the spring and build the perfect, uniform honeycomb. That's another thing I like about bees,’ Paul smiles. ‘They’ve got high standards. They keep things clean and tidy. They're ordered. I find it fascinating, because I can relate to them.’

Paul seized the opportunity to become the first Honeydale beekeeper as a chance to combine his passions and spend more time at the farm, a change to desk work. ‘And I love honey,’ he adds. 

So how did Paul gain the necessary knowhow?

‘The first mistake I made is common amongst budding beekeepers. I went online for advice and found a million different opinions about how to do everything. There are so many beekeepers out there and they are all utterly convinced that their way works and is the only way. You can get very confused very quickly.’

Paul turned to his local beekeeping group, the North Cotswold Beekeepers Association, and went along to the monthly meeting to introduce himself. There, he met Chris Wells, owner of Cotswold Bees, who was running beekeeping courses as well as being a successful beekeeper himself. Paul attended a face-to-face course and Chris agreed to become his mentor, partly because, thanks to Paul’s work with Cotswold Seeds, he had an extensive knowledge of different species of flowering plants used in the countryside. ‘That was useful and interesting information for Chris,’ comments Paul. ‘We could trade our expertise.’

As well as advising any new beekeepers to attend a face-to-face course like he did, Paul advises joining a local beekeeping association. ‘Not only do you have plenty of advice on tap but you may get the chance to borrow expensive kit, for extracting honey for instance, but membership in an association tends to include insurance, covering members for theft or damage for up to three hives.’

Ian and Celene Wilkinson bought Honeydale Farm in 2012 and Paul installed his first beehives on the farm the following summer. ‘We knew we were going to have lots of flowering crops there that would be good for birds, the bees and insects so it made sense to have an apiary to produce honey from Honeydale Farm,’ explains Paul, who built and painted the hives in the old farm buildings with help from Ian and Celene’s children. The first hives were WBC hives, the pretty ‘chocolate box’ hives that most people would be familiar with, but since then he has started using National hives which are much easier to handle, and have more space for the bees.

The Bee Team Expands 

Tony Yarrow joined the Bee Team four years ago. Tony keeps hives at three other locations around Oxfordshire and he also had an interesting route into beekeeping. 

‘It was quite accidental really,’ remembers Tony. ‘After reading history at Cambridge I wasn’t sure what to do with my life. I’d had a job on a big estate in North Wales in the summer holidays which I'd absolutely loved so I went to work on another estate in South Wales and while tidying out a barn one morning, back in April 1975, I was just immediately fascinated by the incredible hexagonal structure of the combs in an old beehive. It was so beautifully made and I immediately knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to find out more about bees and become a commercial beekeeper. That never quite happened but I did go into the bee trade and worked as sales manager and general manager for companies that sold beehives. 

‘Taylors of Welwyn was a hundred-year-old company with a vast library of bee books. I'm a voracious reader so I read a lot and then went to work for Steele and Brodie, part of a bigger enterprise called Honey Farmers which included Heather Hills Honey Farm at Blairgowrie, which at that time was the biggest bee farm in the country with about 1800 hives. I also lodged for a short time with the bee manager at Clapper Hill Honey Farm near Basingstoke, which belonged to David Rowse, one of the UK’s most famous beekeepers, who had a queen rearing unit. I was lucky to work with some of the UK's best beekeepers. I picked their brains and I learned a lot.’

The Honeydale honey apiary now comprises Tony and Paul’s hives. ‘I typically have two or three hives and Tony has six or seven,’ says Paul. ‘We keep bees in the same way. Tony really likes the deep National hives, which have greater capacity in the brood chamber, which is crucial for low-intervention bee management and I’m moving away from WBCs so that we can share parts and give the bees more space. The demand for honey from the Cafe is so high, it's a good job Tony’s here now, because I wouldn't be able to produce the quantity of honey that he can.’

Paul’s knowledge of flowering species of plants is still invaluable. ‘We have a whole host of different plants at the farm, including the species included in our herbal leys which farmers use to feed their animals but at the same time provide a habitat and forage for pollen and nectar loving insects. We have some monoculture crops like sainfoin but they're legumes that are very good for soil health and also have benefits of being very good pollen and nectar sources. We also have field margins, hedgerows, wildflower meadows, fallow areas, all sorts of different types of plants which produce lovely pollen and nectar and so the honey that we have at FarmED is from a huge diversity of plants. The good thing about that is that if you're trying to sustain bees you want consistency of forage over the course of the year. If you rely on one type of plant like lavender, for example, it can have a bad year and then you're in trouble, the bees will have to find forage elsewhere - if it exists - and you're going to have a lack of honey, or even worse, lose your bees. At the farm we have used lots of different plants for resilience and it's healthier for the bees because they've got a choice of forage, no doubt they get various different medicinal benefits from different plants too.

The Honeydale Honey is delicious. ‘It’s quite light and floral because of all the different flowers that go into it, we can always tell our honey from a mile-off’ says Paul.

Why Beekeeping is a Complex Environmental Act 

‘This is a bit controversial,’ says Paul. ‘But bees have become almost like little farmed animals because, through years of selection and breeding in order to create the ‘ideal’ bee - which is a good balance between honey production and aggression, a lot of the genetics of native bees have been lost. It could be argued that they need a farmer, or beekeeper to tend them. However there are industrial beekeeping outfits all over the world that keep bees in a very intensive and irresponsible way and we want to get away from that. No-one knows for sure but I think that if there were no beekeepers there could be little or no bees in our landscape at all, but they are crucial for pollinating many of our plants and flowers. The way we generally farm and cut down trees destroys their natural habitat and foraging opportunities, so I'm not sure how well they'd survive without us beekeepers. They would certainly diminish.

‘But I appreciate there is a whole other train of thought.  Some say that to encourage wild bee genetics back into the general population we should go through a period of pain, and reduce or stop management of them altogether. The theory being that the most resilient bees would survive and go on to multiply and repopulate our countryside. But, if we were to go down this route, there is a huge risk we may lose bees altogether. I'm not convinced. That's why what we are doing at FarmED is important. Our honey apiary is quite different to many other managed apiaries. We still keep bees in boxes and harvest the honey, but we try to avoid interfering with the bees as much as possible. It’s as hands-off as we could possibly be. For us it’s a happy medium between harvesting honey but not over-managing bees. If we didn't need honey then we might do it differently again. But we think that possibly producing honey is a way to encourage the protection of bees.’

Wild Bees

The Rocket Hive!

In addition to the honey apiary, FarmED is also home to the Tree Hive apiary, which you can find nestled in a sheltered corner of the meadow close to the Kitchen Garden. This is an experimental site run by the other half of FarmED’s Bee Team and the founders of Therapi Honey Skincare: the mother-daughter duo, Tanya and Esme Hawkes.

With a combined fifty years of beekeeping experience, as well as backgrounds in nature conservation and ecology, they are looking at how honey bees behave naturally without management to see how we can better support these vital pollinators.

‘The Tree Hive apiary is the realisation of our long-held dream to take honey bees back to the trees’, explains Esme. ‘Honey bees have evolved as part of a woodland ecosystem and are naturally tree-dwelling animals. Not so long ago, they would have commonly made their homes in the hollow cavities of old trees in the ancient forests of Britain. These nest sites provided everything that honey bees need: shelter, good thermoregulation, height off the ground to minimise disturbance from unwanted guests, arboreal mating sites, vast multi-layered canopies of pollen and nectar-rich flowers (like a 3D vertical meadow), deep roots to draw water to ensure a consistent nectar flow and aromatic resins that bees use as medicines. And perhaps even further interconnected ecological benefits that are understudied and underestimated in their importance to both honey bees and their ecosystem’s health.'

We began creating the tree hive apiary in 2020 after being invited by Ian and Celene to join the then early-stage transformation of Honeydale Farm. Their vision for the scope of FarmED was inspirational and the trust, encouragement and freedom they have given us to keep bees ‘outside of the box’ has been phenomenal.

Most of the pressures honey bees are under are indirectly and directly human-made - including problems introduced through human-centred approaches to beekeeping - so we turned to nature for solutions. Working with conservationist, wood sculptor and tree surgeon, Rhys Davis, we began hollowing out salvaged sections of tree trunk, experimenting with different aspects from cavity dimensions, volume, entrance aperture, wall thickness and types of wood to create as near-perfect a home as possible for honey bees.

The first tree hive we installed was from a very large section of ash tree trunk. We excitedly waited for weeks for a swarm to self-populate it but no bees came and instead the very wide and insulated cavity we had made became a haven for damp-loving invertebrates - great for beetles and woodlice but not for honey bees. We learned some important lessons and later that summer we installed a second tree hive made of red cedar that was far smaller with a much narrower cavity. We introduced a swarm we had caught to it and they took to it immediately. We had our first ‘free-living’ colony of honey bees.

From there we continued to expand the apiary with a section of fallen tree that we rescued from a nearby farm, which already had wild bees living in it, an African top bar hive and a magnificent tree hive on stilts - the aptly named Rocket Hive - created by Matt Somerville from Bee Kind Hives. All were self-populated, which we took to be a very good sign: we must be doing something right!

All of our findings seemed to match up with a lot of the scientific research from Cornell University, where they’ve been studying free living bees under the brilliant biologist and ethologist, Tom Seeley. Thermal regulation is really key because a lot of hives have quite thin walls, which leads to greater temperature variability, whereas tree hives are far more consistent - cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter. Due to their organic nature, they also have rougher walls, which stimulates the bees to line the inside with propolis - a vital part of the colony’s immune system. When you've got smooth machined wood, like you have in conventional hives, the bees tend not to use as much propolis on the inside of the boards.

‘We are looking at the honey bee colony as a living system rather than as a honey production unit. It’s a completely different perspective.’ Tanya goes on to explain: ‘All of the things that honey bee colonies produce are really valuable - not just honey but things like propolis, pollen and beeswax too. But if you just look at honey bees as a source of commodities, it very much affects the way you manage them. Over many years bees have been interbred for traits that honey producers want. Sometimes that comes at a cost - it is, for example, not beneficial to the bees to have high propolis production bred out of them as this leads to lower immunity and greater susceptibility to disease.'

Much conventional beekeeping can be intensive and interventionist, relying on routine sugar feeding (a simple refined sugar with little nutrition), pesticide use to treat parasites and sometimes wing clipping of the queen or queen cell destruction to try to prevent swarming (swarming is an important part of the colony's health and life cycle). It also often involves opening up the hives frequently, which can be incredibly disruptive to the bees, who work hard to maintain a consistent internal temperature when rearing brood, and this can set them back by weeks. When managing bees for honey production, it is far better for the bees to use low intervention methods like Tony and Paul do, where as much as possible they observe the honey bees from outside of the hive to minimise disturbance.

In theory a honey bee colony is perennial - given the right conditions, it doesn’t ever need to die out because there will always be a new queen to replace the old queen. But because of all the challenges they are facing, including environmental pressures such as climatic shift, lack of habitat, lack of forage and diversity, as well as the cocktail of toxic pesticides in many sprayed crops, they are really struggling.

Honey bees have existed and been evolving for around 100 million years - they have been around for far longer than us. What we are trying to do at FarmED is observe how free-living honeybees behave in nature. Modern anthropocentric beekeeping has skewed the way we look at honey bees, seeing them as more like domesticated farmed animals than wild creatures. Instead, at FarmED we are trying to build up a strong resilient gene pool shaped by natural selection. By providing the honey bees with what they need rather than what humans want, they are given the best chance of survival.

From scientific research centres like Cornell University, there is evidence that bees can evolve to deal with a lot of environmental challenges, but it takes time and also means allowing the weaker gene types to die out, which can be heartbreaking. But by looking at how bees behave in the wild and allowing their natural cycles to occur, this can then inform our decisions as to how to support bees better when we manage them.

One interesting example is that conventional frame hives keep all the brood in the bottom hive box, with a queen excluder to prevent her from moving up and laying in the upper boxes. This means the bees are forced to store most of their surplus honey above the queen excluder. This arrangement can make it more challenging to reach these essential winter food stores without moving away from the queen and breaking their warm winter cluster. In a tree hive, they tend to build out in more of a cylinder with the queen and brood at the centre in the warmest part, with honey and pollen being stored around them. Because they are cocooned on all sides with winter honey supplies, they do not have far to go to find food and they may be more likely to survive the winter. We are very lucky in that in the five years that we have been at FarmED, almost all of our colonies have survived year on year. The last couple of years have been very hard for honey bees with many beekeepers reporting losses of 50% or more.

Why do we need to create homes for wild free living bees? 

‘In the ancient forests of Britain they would have naturally nested in woodland clearings in old trees. And that's part of the reason why you'll often find them in places such as chimneys because there is a real lack of old trees that are left in place to senesce and hollow out for wildlife to move into. It’s important that wild populations are encouraged and supported - in a way they are like a seed bank. We need to maintain high genetic diversity across all species - it is our greatest chance of survival in a rapidly changing world.’

If people want to provide habitats for wild bees, what should they do?

‘If you've got a bit of woodland or scrubland or anything like that you could do it. Leaving old trees in situ is the ideal scenario but if that’s not available to you then we think tree hives are the next best thing. The beauty of the rocket hive is it’s high off the ground so that the bees’ flight path is uninterrupted and they are less likely to be disturbed. Matt Somerville also makes log hives without legs that you can string up in a tree, a bit like a bird box. You can check out his website at Bee Kind Hives, as well as explore the Free Living Bee Project, which has a wealth of information on everything we’ve talked about.’

Buzzing bees in their natural habitat!

The Wonder of Bees

Our recent bee course alumni learning out in the apairy!

Why has Tony Yarrow, who is running the Beekeeping for Beginners course at FarmED, remained fascinated with bees for half a century?

‘It's a combination of things. Bees are so ancient, they've been around for a hundred million years, so the time that humans have been on the earth is a blink of an eye to them. And the Industrial Revolution and all that that's brought in the last couple of hundred years is just nothing in the timespan of bees. They have this extraordinary, evolved social organization. You just keep thinking, how on earth do they know how to do that? You're in awe of them, really. As a beekeeper you realise that they know more than you do. Your interventions become less frequent and more a case of observing. The more you know, the more you realise you don't know. And no two seasons are alike. It's extraordinary how different each season is from every other season. You approach each year as a beginner, really, it’s a constant learning process. It’s quite humbling because bees are so extraordinary and they don't always do what the books tell you they’ll do. For instance many books say that if you split a colony it won’t swarm but I've split a colony of bees into two and both halves have swarmed. They don't do what you expect. Humans are good at imposing their own ideas on a situation but in beekeeping you can't do that.

’In my 50 years as a beekeeper there have been two really outstanding honey years, 1984 and last year. Last year wasn’t particularly good until the end of June and then suddenly it became fantastic. The spring was cool and damp and the spring honey crop was a bit below average. But then in early June, we had a cold north wind that blew every day for about a fortnight and nothing happened at all. But the flowers wait for the weather because they want to be pollinated. And on days when the bees can't fly, they just sit there and they wait. So come the middle of June, there was lots of moisture in the soil and moisture is important. Flowers need water to produce nectar which is 80% water and there was lots of it, lots of flowers and suddenly the temperature warmed up and it wasn't just warm in the day, it was warm in the night and that matters because in the daytime the nectar rises up the nectar tube in the plant but at night if it's a cold night it goes back down again, but if it's a warm night it stays up there which means that the bees can start foraging early in the morning. From about the 20th of June to about the 15th of August, the honey just poured in. I just spent the best part of two months putting honey boxes on and watching them fill up at astonishing speed. Amazing. Even after doing this job for so long, bees can still amaze me. There's a constant sense of wonder. It's a bit like, in the Narnia books, when you go beekeeping you go out of the 21st century and into a different world.  It's completely got its own time scale and its own rules and you can lose yourself in it and I love that.’

Paul Totterdell agrees. ‘There is nothing better than in the height of the season, going to the apiary  - the sun is out, the bees are healthy, and you can just see the whole system working. You can see all the beautiful pollen that they bring in from all the different plants and you get lovely honey output at the end of it. The challenges are when you lose a colony and there's no explanation as to why. That’s the mystery of bees. There's a lot of mystery involved with them and sometimes you just have to roll with it. One thing I've learned is never do beekeeping in a rush. If you try and rush you pass on that feeling to the bees. If you’re uptight and stressed and you're trying to rush through things, you can guarantee that that's the time they're going to play up the worst. How you carry yourself is important.  I would say the best thing about beekeeping is just the experience of doing it. There's nothing better.’

Learn how to be a Beekeeper at FarmED

The Bee Team

‘FarmED is a great place to come and learn about beekeeping because we've got beehives so close to the conference barn,’ says Paul. ‘We’ve got two different apiaries within a five minute walk of the actual learning facilities. So you can very quickly get hands-on and mix the theory with practical learning.  Because we’re not industrial scale beekeepers, it’s a setup that a small scale beekeeper could actually relate to. The type of beekeeping I do, when you've only got two or three hives, is very typical for somebody who'd be doing it from home.

Join us on our next beekeeping course: Beekeeping for Beginners on Wednesday, 2nd April for a full day of theory and practical sessions. 

None of the members of the FarmED Bee Team have their own land so that’s not necessarily a barrier. ‘All you need to do to be a beekeeper is find an area rich in flowering plants, crops and hedgerows, even just one wildflower meadow could be enough to support a hive of bees,’ says Paul.