Fernhill Heath Honey

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Fernhill Heath Honey We maintain a few hives in the Fernhill Heath area of Worcester, with the strength and health of the bees being our priority.

It was a hard one to be fair. But here she is from the earlier picture
24/07/2026

It was a hard one to be fair.

But here she is from the earlier picture

This weekend we played hunt the new queen (in two hives)... we played it last week with no luck, but this week we found ...
18/07/2026

This weekend we played hunt the new queen (in two hives)... we played it last week with no luck, but this week we found both of them.

No eggs yet, so she may still need to go on her mating flight, but can you spot one of the new queens on the frame in the picture.

Its warm out there... hope you're all managing in this heat...
10/07/2026

Its warm out there... hope you're all managing in this heat...

They are working hard!!!
07/07/2026

They are working hard!!!

05/07/2026

🐝 Weekly Hive Inspection – The Monster Hive

This hive is being managed a little differently to the others.

The keen‑eyed among you will notice it has a brood box on the top and the bottom, plus entrances in the middle as well as the bottom. This hive is being run using a Snelgrove board as a method of swarm control.

There are pros and cons to this method.
A pro: you get a massive colony, which is brilliant for honey production.
A con: you get a massive colony… which means some very heavy boxes to move.

The principle is simple — separate the queen from the brood. In this setup, all the brood goes in the top box and the queen stays in the bottom box to keep laying. As the brood in the top box emerges, we can manipulate the doors in the middle of the stack and direct the working bees down to the bottom box so they can focus on filling the supers.

As the top brood frames empty, we rotate them with fresh frames from below. This rolling process keeps giving the queen space to lay and maintains a large, strong working colony.

Going through the top box, Gav realises he really should have brought the steps out. But it’s a quick check to pull out any emergency queen cells (we don’t want a queen up there) and make sure they have enough food and enough bees to keep the brood warm.

Then comes the effort of lifting the top brood box — probably around 30kg.

Underneath is the Snelgrove board. The mesh prevents the top and bottom colonies from freely mixing, but keeps the hive scent unified. This means that as we open and close the gates, the bees can be intentionally moved between the two colonies without fighting.

Board removed, and it’s a quick check of the supers. Honey looking good, capping nicely and…

And…

Oh dear.

We have eggs in the supers.
We should not have eggs in the supers.

We know the queen was in the bottom box last week. We know there’s a queen excluder between the brood box and the supers. So she shouldn’t be up here.

So how do we have eggs?

At this point there are a lot of possible reasons, but honestly we just have to check every frame and see if we can find a queen.

As we go through each frame, we see more eggs but no queen.

So we check the bottom brood box.
No brood.
No eggs.
No queen.
And every frame filled with honey.

So we assume the queen has somehow got into the super and the bees have back‑filled the brood box. And we’re going to work with that assumption.

We put an empty super on top and start meticulously inspecting every frame. Nothing in the first super. Nothing in the empty box. Eighteen frames out of twenty checked and I won’t lie — starting to worry.

Then frame nineteen… there she is. Our marked queen.

We clip her safely while we dismantle the hive again to restructure it.

Since the bottom box is full of honey, she’d have nowhere to lay. So the top box — which has space — needs to go on the base. If the top box is 30kg, the bottom one is closer to 40kg. It’s heavy.

Old top box in place, queen released, supers back on. But now we have a brood box full of honey and bees to deal with.

So we put a clearer board on to try and clear the top box. In a few days, when we’re home, we’ll extract the honey to empty the brood frames so the queen has space again. We’ll feed the honey back to the bees afterwards, as it’s likely not ripe and we don’t take honey from brood frames to sell.

Our spinner can’t fit brood frames, but hopefully we can borrow one from our friends The Budds, The Birds and The Bees that can.

Crown board on top, and because it’s warm and there are a lot of bees, we leave the top hole open with mesh and ensure the lid vents are open to prevent overheating.

Once we’re back home, we’ll remove this top box and give them more supers — this colony is huge.

This “simple” check took over an hour on this hive alone.

Bees… they always keep us on our toes.

05/07/2026

Weekly Hive Inspection. Week 12

Inspection is brought forward this week because it’s our anniversary weekend, one year married, and we’re going away for a few days.
The bees, of course, don’t care about our celebrations.
They still need checking before we go, and again when we return, to make sure we haven’t missed anything.

It should be a quick one, because we won’t be looking in hive one or hive two this week.
We’re giving the new queens time to mate and settle.
So it’s just a couple of nucs and hive four to check.

Into the first nuc we go.
They’re now starting to forage as the nurse bees reach that age.
The queen is still laying well.
There’s plenty of food available, brood in all stages, and hopefully as the new bees emerge and their numbers increase, they’ll start drawing out the fresh frames for use.

On to the second nuc.
This is the queen that’s the mother to all the other hives, apart from the swarms we’ve caught.
They are really strong, and honestly, they should be in a full hive.
But for now, we’re leaving them in a nuc and letting them fill supers.

As we check one of the supers, it’s full and needs to come off.
That’s a job for when we’re back.
Every frame in the box is capped and ready to go.

A quick look in the brood box shows the frames are laid up beautifully.
Full of brood, with a nice ring of stores around the edges.
Honey and pollen exactly where it should be.

Even though this queen is at least three years old, she’s performing perfectly.
Her bees are gentle, calm, and brilliant workers.
It will be a sad day when she’s no more.

Now we move on to hive four.
It’s a bit of a monster hive.
In fact… no.
What happened in this hive needs its own post.
Let’s just say, simple inspections often never go to plan.

See you soon.

04/07/2026

Weekly Hive Inspection. Week 11

Bit of a late post this week as work and life's been a bit busy this past week.

But the weekends inspection was done OK Friday morning before we headed north again for family.

A quick check on the nuc with the original queen to see they have food and she's still laying.

With low numbers of bees they aren't out foraging hard yet, but they have plenty of food available from the frames we give them and enough bees to cover and keep the brood warm so it can emerge in the coming weeks.

All looking fine, queen seen and hopefully next few weeks their numbers will increase and we can use them to make some new frames.


Then its on to the original hive, quick super check. Top box looks like it will be ready next week. Other boxes are filling nicely. There is such a heavy flow of nectar the moment that we have to hope that we will have a really good honey crop in totally this year.

In to the brood box and it's now a thorough check of all frames. Identify what we think is a good looking queen cell and remove any others.

We find what looks like a nice queen cell on this frame, and we mark the frame so we know where it was for when we come back and check in a couple of weeks.

Now we continue removing fevery other queen cell we find.

If we leave others there is always the cross they could swarm on the vfirst queen emerging (taking half the bees with them) and then leaving the second queen to head up the colony.

Obviously we don't want to loose half our bees, plus swarms though not really a threat can be intimidating and can cause problems if they set up home in inconvenient places..

As you can see there are a lot of queen cells to remove and they do like to hide them to try and catch you out.

With that. We close them back up and we won't look in the brood box for a couple of weeks which by that time there should be a new queen eggs.

22/06/2026

Weekly Hive Inspection 10 and a bit....

After finding queen cells and clear signs of swarm preparation, we need to step in and manage the swarm instinct.
Bees swarm for a number of reasons, but in this case the hive is crowded.
There’s been an explosion in bee numbers, food is plentiful, and the weather is good.
It’s the perfect recipe for swarming.

To remove this instinct, we’re using the nucleus method.
We take the old queen, a frame or two of brood, some bees, and move them into a separate nuc box.

A nuc is basically a half‑size hive.

By doing this, we relieve congestion in the parent hive and stop the swarming impulse.
The remaining bees will then raise a new queen.

At the weekend inspection, we’ll go back into the parent hive and pull down all but one queen cell.

We’ll leave that single cell so they can raise their new queen.

The nuc, although small, will build up nicely.
Just like our other nuc, we’ll use it to draw out new wax frames and decide later what we want to do with it.

But for now, hopefully swarm avoided and the hive can continue honey production.

21/06/2026

🐝 Weekly Hive Inspection – Week 10

This week was an early morning inspection before we headed north to see family.

It was supposed to be a quick check for space, and then back on the road.
But of course, the bees had other ideas.

They were a little more grumpy than usual, probably because they weren’t fully awake yet, and more bees were still inside the hive.
Kerry took the lead on this one while I checked the other colonies.

The summer flow is starting, and the supers are filling nicely.
But down in the brood box, Kerry finds queen cells.
Not just one, but several.
They’re preparing to swarm.

It’s a bit of a shock with a new queen, but at the same time, it isn’t.

She’s been laying extremely well, which means the colony is big and strong.
And with most of the brood box full of brood, she hasn’t had much space left to lay.

Lack of space is one of the biggest triggers for swarming.

Our challenge now is how to deal with this while still keeping the hive productive for the summer honey, and without losing half the bees to a swarm.

There are plenty of ways we can intervene at this point.

But with no time today, Kerry has simply removed the queen cells.
This won’t prevent swarming, but it buys us time until Monday, when we can address the situation properly.

So we’ll show you which method we choose in the next couple of days.

16/06/2026

🍯Honey extraction

After we put the clearer boards on the other day, we’re hoping that when we open the hive, the supers will have very few bees inside.

So in we go.
We’ve got the smoker to hand just in case, but we’re hoping to be in and out quickly.

Lifting the lid, we can see the clearer board has done its job.
There are only a handful of bees in the top box.
So it’s a quick brush of the bees off each frame, and then we transfer the frames into a box to bring into the house.

We use a horsehair brush to gently brush the bees toward the front of the hive.
Then it’s into the box, frame by frame, until the super is empty.
Once that’s done, we close the hive up and head into the honey room to get this honey spun.

Before we can spin the honey, we need to take the cappings off.
There are lots of ways to do this, but we like to use a simple decapping fork and just lift the wax caps away.
These go into a bucket that we’ll give back to the bees to clean up.
Once they’ve cleaned it, we’ll be left with wax cappings we can use for candles, creams, and other bits.

With the cappings off, we do a quick check with a refractometer.
This tells us the water content of the honey.
Legally, it has to be under 20%.
Anything higher than 18% could see it start to could ferment.

As you can see, we’re at about 16% water.
So even though the honey wasn’t capped, it’s more than ripe enough.

With that checked, it’s frames into the spinner.
Then it’s the manual work of spinning the honey out.

Once that’s done, the honey is run through a fine sieve to catch any bits of wax or debris.
Then it’s left to settle in the bucket.

We’ll leave it for a week to settle.
That lets the tiny wax particles and trapped air bubbles float to the top.
After that, it’ll be ready to jar.

With the frames now empty, they can go back to the bees to clean, repair, and reuse.

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