About Us

Yorkshire Bees & Honey have been about since 2012. It was formed by Charles who has been keeping bees since the mid 1980’s. We currently run over 200 production colonies and breed queens for the puplic plus some for ourselves and our commercial partners.

We are one of the few that believe, and have proved, it possible to run bees without treatment and after having some apriaries that haven’t been treated for Varroa since 2012, in 2022 we made the desicion to stop treating on all of our colonies.

Hence you can be assured that the honey is produced by resiliant bees capable of thriving in their environment.

Running bees that are not treated is still in its infancy and simply transitioning to a treatment free environment may not suit all management practices. However, we are seeing signs of VSH (Varroa Sensitive Hygine) in most of our colonies and look to promote that trait and breed off those bees.

Our JB strain is from our original untreated apairy and we see these bees generally not tailing off as you would see in bees susceptible to Varroa. These are open mated and have had over 100kg of honey off some of these colonies so perform well under the right conditions.

We run an ApiTracer app on all of our colonies to track queens and productivity and the JB strain was only out performed by a Carpatian strain that was situated on an exeptional site in 2022 season. We will continue to monitor performance going forward.

We also believe we are the only comercial supplier of small cell bees. This is in its infancy but do expect a few nucs to be available this season.