Bishops Bees

Home
Bishops Bees

Call Website Contact the business

We are UK honeybee queen breeders based in North Devon and offer UK bred honey bee queens and nucs

14/10/2026

Steel roof production will soon be starting again for next season. 🔨🐝

Autumn and winter aren't particularly quiet in the workshop. Once the main beekeeping season begins to slow down, it's time to start preparing equipment for the following year.

One of those jobs is making our galvanised steel hive roofs.

We manufacture these ourselves here at Bishops Bees, and making them in batches over the winter means we can have roofs ready for beekeepers ahead of the spring season.

We'll shortly be opening pre-orders for spring 2027, which also helps us plan production and make sure we're producing the right quantities and sizes.

I'll share some more over the coming weeks about how the roofs are made and some of the thinking behind their design.

For now, it's nearly time to get the sheet steel and folder back to work!

10/10/2026

Old comb doesn't necessarily mean the wooden frame has reached the end of its life. 🐝

Once we've selected older brood comb for replacement and removed it from the colonies, the next job is dealing with it properly.

I steam the old frames. The heat melts out the remaining beeswax, which we can collect and recover rather than throwing away.

What remains in old brood comb isn't just wax. Each time a bee develops in a cell it leaves behind a larval cocoon, and over successive generations these accumulate within the comb. Once the wax has been removed, that old material needs to be cleared away and disposed of appropriately.

The wooden frames themselves can then be cleaned and sterilised before being fitted with fresh foundation ready to go back into service.

Beeswax is a useful resource, and a well-made wooden frame can have a long working life, so there's little reason to discard either unnecessarily.

It's another part of our gradual comb-renewal programme: old comb comes out, the useful materials are recovered, and clean foundation goes back into the colonies.

07/10/2026

Getting nucs ready for winter is more about assessment than following a fixed list of jobs. 🐝

At this time of year I'm going through the nucs and looking at how each colony is shaping up for winter.

Colony strength is important. I want to see a good population of bees and a colony that is functioning well, but I'm also paying close attention to their stores.

Some nucs will need feeding to make sure they have sufficient food for winter. Others already have adequate stores and don't need additional syrup simply because it's autumn. The important thing is to assess what is there and feed where it is actually required.

It's also a useful time to watch what's happening at the entrance.

Wasp pressure can be considerable at this time of year, particularly around smaller colonies. Seeing the guard bees actively challenging wasps and preventing them from entering is reassuring. What I don't want to see is wasps moving freely in and out of a nuc without resistance.

None of these things tells the whole story by itself. Strength, stores, feeding, entrance activity and general colony behaviour all help build a picture of how well prepared that nuc is for the months ahead.

Winter preparation isn't about treating every colony identically. It's about identifying what each one needs while there is still time to do something about it.

03/10/2026

Autumn varroa control is really about protecting the bees that will carry the colony through winter. 🐝

As we move out of the main season, one of the jobs we're concentrating on is reducing varroa levels in the colonies.

At this point in the year the colony is changing. Brood production is beginning to reduce and the bees being produced now will increasingly form the population that has to survive through the winter and take the colony into next spring.

That makes their health particularly important.

Varroa doesn't just take resources directly from developing and adult bees; high mite levels are also closely associated with the transmission and amplification of damaging viruses. Allowing that pressure to remain high while the winter population is being produced can leave the colony going into winter with bees that are already compromised.

So autumn treatment isn't simply another job to tick off at the end of the season. The aim is to bring mite levels down and give the winter population the best opportunity to remain healthy and long-lived.

As with feeding, it is part of looking ahead. What we do to the colonies now has a considerable influence on what comes out of winter next spring.

19/09/2026

One reason I'm particularly careful when feeding smaller colonies at this time of year is wasp pressure. 🐝

As natural forage declines, wasps can put considerable pressure on nucs and weaker colonies, particularly where syrup or accessible stores provide an additional attraction.

This was the scene outside one of our overwintering nucs. The bees had been actively defending the entrance, and there were several dead wasps immediately outside. While I was checking the colony, another wasp attempted to enter and was attacked almost immediately.

It's a behaviour I like to see. A colony needs to be able to defend its stores, particularly as we move towards autumn.

Feeding can be important — especially for nucs that don't yet have adequate winter stores — but it shouldn't be considered in isolation. Colony strength, entrance size, wasp pressure and the risk of robbing all form part of the decision.

Good autumn management is less about following a list of jobs and more about looking at what each colony actually needs.

16/09/2026

Feeding bees isn't an automatic autumn job. 🐝

At this time of year I'm paying particularly close attention to the nucs and smaller colonies.

Some will need feeding to help them build adequate stores before winter, while others may already have plenty and need very little — or nothing at all.

This is a syrup feeder on one of the nucs. Smaller colonies have less capacity to gather and store large quantities of food, and some of our later nucs simply haven't had as much of the season available to them as an established production colony.

But I don't want to feed simply because the calendar says it's autumn.

Before deciding, I look at the stores already in the colony, the amount of brood still being raised, colony strength, available forage and how much time remains for them to process the feed.

The aim is to get each colony properly provisioned for winter rather than applying exactly the same management to every hive.

That may mean feeding one nuc quite heavily while leaving another colony alone.

Assess first, then feed what is actually required.

12/09/2026

Not every frame stays in a colony indefinitely. 🐝

As we work through the colonies, we identify some of the older brood frames and gradually move them towards the outside of the brood nest, or into a position where the queen is unlikely to continue laying in them.

On average, I aim to replace around three frames per brood box as part of the renewal process.

Once those frames are free of brood, any honey can be extracted rather than wasted. The old comb is then removed by steaming the frames, which melts out the remaining wax and helps us remove the accumulated residue and old larval cocoons from years of brood rearing.

The wooden frames can then be cleaned and sterilised before being fitted with fresh foundation and put back into use.

It means we can steadily introduce clean new comb without suddenly stripping a colony of large amounts of drawn comb all at once.

Comb renewal is one of those quieter parts of colony management. It is not a job that needs doing to every frame every year, but a gradual replacement programme helps keep the brood nest in good condition while allowing us to reuse the wooden frames for many years.

02/09/2026

When you assess stores, look at where the food is — not just how much honey is somewhere in the hive. 🐝

This frame is a useful example of what I like to see as we begin moving out of the most active part of the season.

There is still a good solid area of sealed brood, but around it the colony is already organising its food. Above the brood is the familiar arch of stores, with sealed honey and open stores positioned close to where the bees are raising brood.

That relationship becomes increasingly important as the brood nest contracts.

It is easy to look at a colony with a super of honey above a queen excluder and conclude that it has plenty of food. But the more useful question is: what stores will actually remain with the colony when our management is finished?

Some colonies will readily move honey down through a queen excluder, while others can be reluctant to do so. The difficulty is that you often don't discover which sort you have until the colony is already short of usable stores. If the supers are removed and there is very little food around the brood nest, we can suddenly leave a colony much shorter of stores than it first appeared.

For me, this is one of the problems with treating everything outside a single brood box as automatically belonging to the beekeeper. During the active season the brood nest can occupy much of that box. The colony's need for food doesn't disappear simply because it has been stored in a super.

Before taking a crop, look at the colony as a whole: the amount of brood, the stores surrounding it, colony strength, the forage still available and the time of year.

Honey is absolutely there to be harvested — but first we need to decide what is genuinely surplus.

22/08/2026

Sometimes helping pollinators means removing a good nectar source.

A couple of weeks ago I was cutting back Himalayan balsam for a customer as part of a meadow restoration project.

There was roughly an acre that I could reach with the Kramer and flail, but the balsam has also spread into the woodland and along the stream, where it will need to be controlled by hand.

As a beekeeper, cutting down a plant that bees readily forage on can feel slightly contradictory. Himalayan balsam can provide a substantial late-season nectar source, but it is also a highly invasive plant that can dominate damp ground and outcompete a much wider range of native vegetation.

The aim here is not simply to remove a flowering plant. It is to restore a more diverse habitat.

Over time, controlling the balsam should give species such as knapweed and other late-flowering plants more opportunity to establish. That means a broader range of food for bees and other pollinators, rather than relying heavily on one invasive species.

Timing matters too. The balsam needs to be cut before the seed pods mature, which means carrying out the work while much of it is still in flower.

We are deliberately avoiding herbicides on this project, so the control is being done mechanically where machinery can reach, followed by hand work in the more difficult areas.

Good pollinator habitat is about diversity and resilience, not simply the quantity of nectar available from a single species.

Address

Opening Hours

Monday	09:00 - 17:00
Tuesday	09:00 - 17:00
Wednesday	09:00 - 17:00
Thursday	09:00 - 17:00
Friday	09:00 - 17:00
Saturday	10:00 - 16:00

Telephone

+447908563545

Website

https://bishopsbees.co.uk/

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Bishops Bees posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Business

Send a message to Bishops Bees:

Want your business to be the top-listed shop?

Country:

City: