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Do you remember the story of the French bees from the town of Ribeauville? Back in 2012 they got stuck into waste shells from coloured M&M’s (yes, the chocolates!) that were being processed at a nearby biogas factory. The bees’ quick sugar fix turned their honey all shades of weird including blue and green, as you can see in the photo from National Geographic here. But the photo you can see with our post here, was taken this week, and is of some stunning coloured, all-natural pollen that our bees have been collecting from ground flora, different weeds and shrubs....

Be sure you're buying pure beeswax, not fake beeswax made from paraffin The Australian Honey Bee Industry Council’s (AHBIC) April 2021 newsletter offers a great reminder about the importance of knowing where your beeswax comes from. Whether you use beeswax for making your own balms and skin care, or for candles, polishes or beeswax wraps, it’s important to know you are actually working with a renewable, pure, Australian beeswax, not paraffin which is an imported petroleum product. At The Beekeeper, we know where our beeswax comes from because we’re out in the beautiful forests of NSW with the bees most...

Imagine the difference in burning a pure beeswax candle vs a toxic paraffin one? We know which one we'd prefer to be in a room with. Or imagine the difference in using pure beeswax as the basis for your lip balm, compared to putting a chemical cocktail on your lips? Yikes!  Even as beekeepers we are shocked sometimes at what importers and retailers try to get away with when it comes to selling purportedly Australian beeswax and honey, especially as they suck in innocent consumers along the way. First there were the well publicised honey recalls and fines back in...

Our beekeeping team recently completed a fascinating queen bee breeding course down at Tocal Agricultural College. As professional beekeepers, access to great queens (with important traits such as good hygiene behaviours, temperament and productivity) is vitally important. We work with some fantastic queen bee breeders, but it's also good to have these skills in-house, not just for our own curiosity and knowledge, but so we can manage the process at different times of the year if there are delays and high demand for queens. We need new queens when we are splitting hives and raising nucs (nucleus colonies) and to replace...