Natural Beekeeping Workshop 2026

After a sunny week, where the bees were buzzing, bearding and looking like they may swarm, the weather suddenly cooled down and was fairly windy. Leading up to the workshop date we’d spotted some dead bees around our hives, so it was the perfect time to host the workshop, where experts were with us on site to assess the situation, and help us to understand more about what was happening!

This workshop took place on Sunday 12th April, and it was a sunny and cloudy kind of day. In our usual format, ‘Natural Bee Guardian’, Guy Thompson, talked through the important factors that every hive needs to maintain a healthy colony of honey bees; then we headed off to the fields and trees to see the free-living honey bees in the tree hives.

Altogether we have 5 tree hives on the site, and each hive had active bees taking in pollen and nectar which was a real joy to see! Simply observing the bees lead to so many questions, and everyone shared their thoughts, experiences and we discussed the huge benefit to putting up these tree hives which provide excellent habitat for honey bees to thrive as naturally as possible.

After lunch, Guy lead the discussion which explored ‘Natural Beekeeping’ versus ‘Manages Bees’. We reviewed the various hives that are available, and in particular the benefits of a bee-centric hive known as the Warre. We also looked at the unoccupied hives in the apiary area, and saw evidence of wasps, wax moth, and in the National hive we saw the impact of varroa (the cause of the dead bees that we had seen earlier). All of these things are important for bee keepers or guardians to understand, and it was a really valuable opportunity to discuss and learn more about them.

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