Energise your Skin. Nurture Nature.
Beekeeping
Beekeeping is an important way of ensuring honeybees are protected and continue to thrive in the UK.
A Beekeeper's Season
A beekeeper’s season starts in March when colonies start to grow and ends around October when the bees enter a period of quasi-hibernation for winter.
Beekeepers regularly check the health of a colony through the year, ensuring there is enough space for both brood and honey stores, checking for disease, and monitoring the likelihood of swarming.
To prevent swarming beekeepers either increase space by adding more beehive boxes, or split a hive by removing frames and placing them into a new hive.
Later in the year, beekeepers assess honey stores and collect excess honeycomb to extract honey and beeswax, leaving enough for the bees to survive winter conditions.
If you are interested in becoming a beekeeper you can find out more at the British Beekeeper's Association (BBKA).
Beekeeping
Beekeeping is the craft of caring for and managing colonies of honeybees, kept in hive boxes commonly constructed of wood.
The purpose of beekeeping is to ensure the continuation of a colony, and to harvest excess honey, beeswax, and propolis. Honeybees are also used to pollinate crops.
Beekeepers use modular hives, such as the Langstroth beehive, which is a vertical design where moveable frames of honeycomb are hung within. In keeping with natural beehive formation, boxes for honey storage are placed above boxes for brood rearing.
A key discovery in beehive design was bee space, a gap large enough for one bee to pass that would not be filled in with comb.
Ethical Beekeeping
While most beekeepers follow good practice, some can harvest what we at Beebuzz believe are unethical products such as royal jelly and bee venom. Extracting these products from honeybees unfortunately causes their deaths.
We refuse to use such products in our cosmetics and instead support pollinators through the British Beekeeping Association.