Laurence visits Adam at Willowbrook Honey apiary to film a series on the 2024 beekeeping season. Heavy spring rain killed honey production, so Adam did colony splits and bought queens from Blacklans and Honey Queens. He now runs three supers on strong hives, eight nuc boxes, and six full-size national hives in 14 × 12 boxes.
Today I'm with Adam from Willowbrook Honey and we're going to take a look inside his apiary. So Adam, thanks for coming on.
How you doing? I'm good, yeah.
You good?
You good?
We have been talking for absolutely hours. How long have I been here for? Probably a couple of hours now.
Yeah, 2 or 3 hours.
Sorry. We looked at the weather and it was supposed to be beautiful. It wasn't sunny, was it? But it was supposed to not rain and it's just been drizzling. For two hours, but it's stopped. It's finally stopped.
Finally.
But thank you for agreeing to come on and let me come and film your apiary.
Oh no, it's a pleasure. I've watched your videos for quite a long time now, so it's hopefully a good experience.
I'm sure.
I'm sure.
Don't be too worried. So Adam has been buying queens off me for a good while now. He comes round and gets queens, and we've always talked about coming into the apiary and doing a little bit of a video. And a lot of people on YouTube have said, "Go to other people's apiaries and do some videos." So that is exactly what we're going to do today. And we are going to split it out into a number of different videos. So in today's first video, we're going to talk about 2024, what 2024 has been like. We've got loads of other different videos that we're going to do, and we're definitely going to go inside some of Adam's hives today and take a look at his bees and see how they're getting on. So 2024, good or bad?
Started off very badly. I think like a lot of people will say that, you know, the weather. All my hives came through winter very strong, and then it just rained. and rained. So no spring honey. I did quite a few splits this year, bought all my queens in. I found it's paid dividends now because a lot of queens are here, didn't get mated properly, and it's very unpredictable.
Yeah.
So yeah, I multiplied my colonies and now we're looking at a reasonable amount of honey. And I've got to a number that I'm quite comfortable at going into next year. So hopefully they get A bit stronger and we can then put them into full hives.
Very nice, cool. And you've got like nice calm bees, it's nice we can stand in the apiary here and not get stung, no valves or anything like that. Where'd you get your bees from?
Oh!
Shameless, shameless plug there.
Do I need to say the name?
It's Blacklans and Honey Queens, we can stand in the apiary and do the work. So you've got, well, you've got 3 supers on this one here?
Yeah, 3 supers. This is probably the strongest one, probably got a bit carried away with splits this year, a lot of People, you know, wanted— came back for nucs and stuff, and I thought with the weather I'm not getting any honey, so yeah, splits was the way forward. I've sort of left with minimal honey, but enough for myself and my wife. But yeah, we've got 3 supers on this one, nice strong colony. This is on a standard national. It's been a mixed year, let's say.
Yeah, and how many beehives have you got in this apiary here?
So we've got 8 sort of nuc splits, I have done on the front here. And then we've got 6 full-size standard national hives from Abello.
Yes, a big fan of Abello. So we're going to cut that short here. If you're interested in learning more about Adam's apiary, I keep wanting to call him David because he's got some crazy secret first name, but we'll stick with Adam. We're talking about stands, we're talking about 14 by 12 boxes, national boxes, double brood, everything to do with this apiary. But we're going to split it up into loads of different videos. So if you're interested, definitely hit the subscribe button because we've got plenty more to come.
