Our main aim is to provide homes for happy bees. We have an apiary in St Ives, Cornwall and practice natural beekeeping which means that we don’t use many of the commercial beekeeping practices like feeding with sugar water, treating for disease with chemicals, using queen separators, replacing queens. We try to let them live as they would in the wild and only take some of their honey when we are sure they have more than enough of their own to eat. We also plant plenty of wildflowers around the hives and everywhere we can.
When hives get too full of bees, the queen leaves with half the bees (aprox 40 000) to look for a new home. They often end up in places like rooves, compost bins, chimneys. If you have a garden or a piece of land, why not provide a home for a swarm of bees and get a hive of your own.
Many bee species are in dramatic decline with some lost forever from Cornwall & UK. Changes in habitat, landscape, use of pesticides and climate change are all taking their toll. Loss of good quality habitat across the UK has had a catastrophic impact on bees. In recent decades, UK managed honeybee hive numbers have decreased by 54%, three bumblebee species have become extinct, 52% of solitary bees have declined and over half of UK bee species have declined in the last 50 years.
