Hill & Harvest

31/07/2026

19/06/2026

Hive 1 — The Elsecar Swarm
A real pleasure to work with. These bees are incredibly gentle, calm on the comb, and building up beautifully. They’ve already filled the brood box and have drawn out every frame in the super. No capped honey just yet, but they’re clearly gathering well and have plenty of promise.

Hive 2 — The Bought Nuc
Now running on a double brood box, with the queen laying strongly and the colony expanding nicely. They’ve got good momentum and seem to be settling in well, although they do have a bit of attitude compared with the gentler colonies.

Hive 3 — The Difficult Nuc
This colony is productive, but definitely not friendly. They’ve been very defensive and have delivered more than a few stings during inspections. On the plus side, they’re working hard, have drawn out all the comb in the super, and are starting to fill it, although nothing is capped yet. A requeen is likely on the cards to improve temperament.

Hive 4 — The Huddersfield Road Swarm
A strong and promising swarm that has moved into its new hive well. They’re prolific, active, and already making good progress. They still have four fresh frames to draw and fill, but judging by their energy, they should make short work of it.

Nuc 1 — The Cone and Cupboard Swarm Combination
This is an interesting one. The combined colony has good numbers and access to brood, but no queen or eggs have been sighted yet. They also haven’t started making queen cells, which suggests there may well be a queen present — just keeping herself hidden for now. One to watch closely over the next inspection or two.

Overall, the apiary is looking strong: plenty of comb being drawn, brood boxes filling up, and supers starting to come into play. A few colonies are showing real promise, while Hive 3 may need a temperamen reset before it becomes enjoyable to handle.

15/06/2026

Out of food HANGRY bees… got stung twice yesterday! They’ve gone from filling up boxes of honey to starving in the space of two weeks because of all that wet weather we’ve been having. It’s ok though, caught it early and they’ve all got some extra feed to get them through that June dearth.

03/04/2026

Really enjoying the new labels on our honey jars. Design all hand drawn, not an AI bot in sight for this one because why would we let AI have the fun bits?

24/03/2026

When we visited New York last year for our honeymoon we had the most incredible bagels, you can’t get anything like them here. So I set out on a journey to make delicious sourdough bagels.

I’ll be bringing our first small batch to the spring farmers market on the 4th… flavours include classic Italian, sesame and cinnamon sugar crust bagels ( my favourite) 🥯 🥯🥯🥯🥯🥯🥯🥯🥯

20/03/2026

We’ve been busy in the kitchen experimenting… and we’re very excited to say we’ve started making sourdough bagels 🥯✨

Pictured here are our Italian sourdough bagels, slowly fermented over 2 days to develop that deep, rich flavour and perfect texture. They’ve got a beautiful chew, a crisp crust, and they’re absolutely spot on toasted with a generous layer of cream cheese 🤤

We’re still perfecting them, but all being well, we’ll be bringing these along to our markets soon 👀

Let us know what you think… and flavours would you like to see on the stall?👇

19/03/2026

Sad day today… we have lost all of our bees over winter. When we checked our hives today, lots of honey but no live bees in sight. We lost two hives in the autumn to wasps and the other three well we will have to investigate as to why.

We will continue to source local honey for the farm shop and once we’ve found the cause we can look at setting some hives back up again.

06/03/2026

After A LOT of baking I’ve finally perfected our master cookie dough recipe. Only a month or so to go till the spring Farmers Market where we’ll be bringing our mini egg cookies! 🍪 🍪🍪🍪🍪🍪🍪🍪🍪🍪

11/02/2026

✨ Behind the scenes at the farm shop ✨

We’ve been busy in our spare time developing new recipes (tough job 😋) and we’re also planning a full overhaul of the Bakery section on our website… so keep an eye out for updates soon! 👀💻

Our latest creation: Salted Caramel & Roasted Walnut Tart 🤍 Delicious… but still needs a few tweaks — a bit more salt in the caramel and slightly less enthusiasm with the walnut filling 😅

More coming soon! 🍰