Our family at work with the Hives.

The beginning of our beekeeping began, not so many years ago, as a hobby. Like so many hobbies, the project soon grew out of all proportions and Berberis House Apiary is now a family run business, headed by David and Irene Arlott. Everyone in the household are involved in some way or other, whether it be managing the colonies, moving the hives to new locations, extracting the honey, packaging or marketing the products.

In our early years of beekeeping we felt like full members of the Bill Turnbull’s ‘Bad Beekeepers Club’. Instead we were and still are, members of the ‘West Norfolk and King’s Lynn Beekeepers Association’. We would like to thank so many of the members who offered us help and advice in our early years. We would also like to thank Andy Wattam, who in our first year was the Regional Bee Inspector, but has since moved on and is now the National Bee Inspector based at the National Bee Unit. Andy visited our home apiary and his advice saved one of our first two hives from extinction. We would also like to thank Keith Morgan who took over from Andy as the Regional Bee Inspector. Keith allowed us to take our hives with his to the Ling Heather in the Derbyshire Peak District. This was in only our second year.

Despite our early mistakes, our honeybees have managed exceedingly well and we must now be doing something right because they have now expanded to almost thirty colonies. We head the majority of our colonies with queens of the Buckfast strain, a bee first developed by Brother Adam who was a monk at the Buckfast Abbey.

With this number of colonies of very prolific bees, coupled with our migratory bee management which gifts us with several harvests each year; we now find we have rather a lot of honey at our disposal. As a result we now have an intensive marketing programme, feeding several outlets and also selling our products at farmers markets and shows. These can be found on our’ where to buy’ page.

Next season we will be moving all but our very best colonies to out apiaries, so that we can use our Berberis House Apiary for selective queen rearing. This is in keeping with our policy to re-queen each of our colonies every year and also to have queens available for our planned expansion.