In this instructional video, Laurence Edwards of Black Mountain Honey walks beekeepers through the UK National Honey Monitoring Scheme (NHMS) run by the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology. He explains how to register for the free service, receive the sampling kits, and correctly collect honey and wax samples from capped frames, ensuring the vials are filled to the line and sealed without contaminating bees. He then demonstrates cleaning the waterproof labels, recording required metadata (date, county, sample ID), and sending the vials back to the scheme. Edwards discusses how the laboratory analyses the pollen content, the meaning of pollen coefficients, and the limitations of the data, such as cross‑contamination and the fact that percentages are not exact measures of nectar composition. He shares surprising results from his own apiary (e.g., high white clover and nettle pollen) and encourages other beekeepers to participate, emphasizing the scheme’s value for tracking floral resources and its free, scientific contribution. The video ends with a call to subscribe.
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Hi, I'm Laurence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey. Welcome to another episode of No Nonsense Beekeeping. Today I'm going to show you how I collect my samples for the National Honey Monitoring Scheme. So the National Honey Monitoring Scheme is set up by the UK Centre for Hydrology and Ecology. I've got that right. And it's a scheme whereby you can register and they will send you a couple of vials like this. And then all you do is you just fill the vials up directly from the hive. So you scrape in wax and honey and pretty much everything. It needs to be capped or as capped as you can possibly get it. And then you just send these vials off down to the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology at certain times of the year. So when they send the packs out, and then— What do they do with it? They come back at some random time in the year. It always seems random when they come back. I think I think it's due to the amount of samples that they have to get through. But at some random time of year, you get an email to say that they've sampled all of your honey, and here is what the pollen counts are in it. So I think it's so good. Like this is I love doing this. We do it every year. We've got an apiary up here. So in a forest apiary, they give you the real pinpoint coordinates. And then they use it for kind of working out what flowers are thriving in the area, if there's any new species. It's really good valuable data. And the service is completely free. So if you're a beekeeper, go onto the National Honey Monitoring website, enter all your details, tell them where your apiary is, and if they haven't got someone literally registered next door to you, then they'll register you up. And then you get a spring and a summer pack and they send you out these vials. All you have to do is fill them up. send them back to the National Honey Monitoring Scheme, and then you get the data. So in this video, I'm just going to show you how to fill one of these up, because at first I got it a bit wrong and just kind of sent some of my jarred honey, and then they said you need to put wax in it. So I'll do that now, and you can scrape it directly in from the frames. And I just do that obviously at the apiary where I've put within the website. So I'll show you how to do it. So all you need to do, find a colony that's got some honey on it. Make sure it's capped. You want nice capped honey for this. Don't send them any nectar because it sits in storage for a good while, so you need to make sure that it's not going to ferment. So you just take your frame like that, and then all you do is you just scrape it in, and there's a fill line on there as well. You want to get it right up to the top. Try not to get any bees in it, and you just scrape it in like that, wax and all. And that's it, absolutely full to the brim. Stick the cap on. And then what we do is we go and take that home, we give it a wash. So the labels and stuff on it, they're all waterproof. We just wash it down, make sure it's nice and clean, and then we put all of the information on. So you need to put like the date on it, the county, the sample ID is already on there, and then you put some information that you've got on there as well. So you just, just follow the instructions that they give you, but you just need to make sure that the information is correct. So what's the information that you Included need to put on there? on the vial. And it's as simple as that. So that's it. It's as simple as that. Takes literally 2 minutes of my time and I get all of that key information about the pollen and the nectar that my bees are foraging on. So a couple of words of caution though with it. It's not 100% accurate and the percentages that they give you don't necessarily mean that that is what the nectar composition of your honey is. So you need to take a look at pollen coefficients If you work out the pollen coefficient, it should give you a better kind of understanding as to the breakdown of the composition of your honey. And also, it doesn't mean that just because a nectar— sorry, a pollen is showing up in your readings that you get on your report, it doesn't mean that your bees were actively foraging on that plant. So you do get some kind of like cross-contamination between flowers. So you might get a bumblebee foraging on, say, a buttercup, and then that bumblebee goes and flies to some Himalayan balsam and deposits a small amount of pollen from the buttercup onto the Himalayan balsam, and then a bee comes along to the Himalayan balsam and picks up that buttercup pollen and goes back to the hive. So you do get some kind of cross-contamination in there. So I always take it with a pinch of salt if you've got something at kind of like 0.1%, it could quite easily be cross-contamination. But it does show the wide variety of pollens that are available for bees to go and collect. The last sample we had back, I think it was either 37 or 38 different types of pollen, some really unusual ones as well, some that I really didn't know that the bees were going to forage on. We had, I think, 7 or 8% nettle, so they were going out and foraging on the flowers of the nettle. I didn't know they foraged on nettle. I was also quite surprised at the composition of how much white clover that the bees were foraging on in my apiary. We had over 60% white clover, And again, I was really, really surprised at the kind of amount of white clover going in there. Obviously, you need to look at the pollen coefficients for that and work out exactly how that's kind of translating to composition within your honey. And it's not an exact science. So like I say, I take the results with a pinch of salt always, but I think it's a really, really useful thing for the UK Centre for Hydrology and Ecology, but also just for me. I think it's really, really interesting. It's a free service. They spin it out and do some kind of DNA analysis on it and then give you a breakdown of the pollen constituents of your honey. So I think it's pretty cool. So that's it for the video. Hope you've enjoyed it. Please hit the subscribe button, please hit the bell so you're notified of every video, and I'll see you next time.
