Fuggles Apiary

Fuggles Apiary Local honey. Fuggles Apiary, our house is named Fuggles after the type of hops that were grown in these fields.

I have 3 apiary sites surrounding Faversham so bees have a wide source of nectar and pollen. Some of these are cherry, apples, dandelion, clover and a Myriad of naturally occurring w**ds like sow thistle.

Hives at home with a lovely backdrop of thorn trees.
26/03/2026

Hives at home with a lovely backdrop of thorn trees.

Must be time to win a free hive.
23/12/2025

Must be time to win a free hive.

Honey bottling for Christmas.
16/12/2025

Honey bottling for Christmas.

05/11/2025

November

I do love the honey show although I did nearly get chucked out once:- I had driven the two hours to get to the show and arrived in time to get a coffee and join the throng in the main hall. There was a helicopter landing on the racecourse, some well-heeled jockey I thought, (I was nearly right). Coffee in hand, I am ready to go into the main hall, except my way is blocked by a steward, behind him, in the distance, Princess Anne is being shown around the show. We wait whilst Anne is shown some honey, “Ooh I will have one of those”, turning round she says, “Carruthers give us a fiver”, the stall holder now doing a fair imitation of Uriah Heap, hands wringing together at his obsequious best, “ ah well, sorry mam it is £12.50 a jar,”. Anne turns around again, “God the price these serfs sell things for, give me a twenty Carruthers, and please take the change for me”; (“I am not touching it” hung in the air unsaid). Anne makes her ponderous way around the hall admiring a wax candle on the way, “how quaint”. Eventually Anne with entourage came close to the end of the hall where us mere peasants were queued to get in, a good thirty minutes after opening time; this was when I said in a very loud voice to the steward,” I hope she paid her £12.50 entrance fee. The look I got was the one that you would expect from the ice queen moments before she thrust a diamond sharp sword through someone’s vitals. I shut my mouth and tried to shrink back into servile obscurity.
Well, now the honey show has been and gone and once again I have not won a prize. I know I would stand a better chance if I actually entered something, but I have other issues as well: it is perfection that I have a problem with. Not long back a beekeeping friend who I taught a few years ago, was in our local Deli, she spotted one of my jars of honey with a slightly wonky label; so, whilst the shopkeepers back was turned, she carefully peeled back the label and put it on straight. Of course she told me, in that tut-tut voice. I explained that a label slightly askance gives the desired impression of being produced in a cottage industry.
I know of only two places where you will find jars of honey with perfect labels, jars gleaming, honey filtered, pollen removed, gleaming lucid, perfect: the first place is the honey show of course, the other is in a supermarket with a jar of Chinese honey. Now if I wanted to buy a good jar of honey, I would look for the jar with the handwritten label, honey slightly misty looking and maybe a fleck or two of wax on the top. That’s what my wife gets anyway.
Many years ago, in Ireland, the weather had been bad, even for that country. Three outstanding members of the local beekeeping community had no honey to exhibit and so thought they would try an experiment: they bought some Chinese honey, decanted it into their own jars, labelled it up and put it into the honey show. Of course, they were not going to win except that: one of them came second, another third and the last entrant was unplaced, possibly because the label was not straight enough. I was told this in confidence but it was thirty years ago and the three of them will have moved on to heaven’s pasture’s.
This month is also the time when I do all those cleaning up jobs ready for a new season, the bee suits go in the wash (45 minutes with Vanish Oxi Action), of course if you are a new beekeeper and want to look like an old hand, leave the suit hung up in the shed over winter so that it can develop those lovely mould patches redolent of a well-worn master beekeepers suit. Whilst at it this is a good idea to check the suits for leaks, veils seem to deteriorate and become brittle long before the rest of the suit. I had one hole on my trousers where I had lent the hot smoker against them. My spare suit already had a new veil as my grandson discovered a hole in it as he was helping me one day. Oops.
Another job that I have just done is de coke all my smokers. I have four of these for three reasons: 1. So that I have a spare when I leave one sitting behind on a hive at the last apiary I visited. 2. So that there is a spare when the first one gets clogged up with tar. 3. I can’t resist buying a nice shiny smoker at a honey show.
rejuvenating them is easy: a big blow lamp will burn up all the tar until its flaking off and easy to clean with a wire brush. The last job on the smoker: And this is my top tip: rub around the rim where the top goes on with high temperature grease, this solves the problem of the top becoming irrevocably welded on in use with tar. I wonder whether I can just buy some new trousers?

A busy year and finally finished bottling honey 1.25 tons this year.
05/11/2025

A busy year and finally finished bottling honey 1.25 tons this year.

19/03/2025

Busy bees at last.

21/12/2024

Making wax foundation ready for all that honey in the spring.

Hives still standing after the storm.
08/12/2024

Hives still standing after the storm.

29/11/2024

A recent article my dog wrote for Beecraft magazine:-

“I hate bees”:-
I like a walk in the morning, alright I am habituated to one. This March morning there was a gentle warm breeze wafting across a neighbouring field of r**e bringing a scent of spring to the air. I admit to feeling a bit frisky myself this morning but due to a slightly late start was in desperate need to unload a little. The solution was obvious: those silly boxes on the edge of the field. I strolled over and without even a peremptory sniff lifted my leg. Oh the brief ecstasy before, not even in mid flow, an excruciating pain shot across my nether regions centred on my dangling bits. I leapt into the air and took off, I don’t know why, but it seemed imperative that I circumnavigated the field at full speed. My pet human seemed to be having some sort of apoplectic fit before calling,”Harry” (the epithet that I am known by as he cannot do “woof”) and, exhausted, I complete a final circuit and glissade up to him running my red hot posterior across the grass. I know about bees now, little sh*ts. Walks around the field will be longer from now on as I won’t be going near those boxes again.
As nasty as the little beasts can obviously be they do provide a deal of entertainment when they don’t involve me. The human (Ruff although he calls himself Malcolm) is obsessed with the bees and fiddles with them weekly. I know to keep well clear and watch with leisure.
One morning later on in the spring I am lying in my favourite spot in the long grass, the weather has been really good lately: lots of gentle rain making the ground a bit oozy ( I do love it when mud comes up between my toes) anyway this early morning the sun is shining and there is an excited hum from the bee box before a great commotion and a swirling cloud of bees emerge, spin around, whirl wind like and depart across the field. Me I have my head down and don’t think I am going to rush in to tell the human who is still drinking his morning coffee and staring at this thing called a tablet which is ridiculous as it doesn’t smell of anything. Whether he knew that a lot of his bees had gone I don’t know although I did see him scratching his head when next he looked at them but that might have been because he had just got one of my fleas on his sparse scalp? When I am cross with him I call him Ruff the baldy!
Humans don’t seem to be very bright, have average eyesight but no discernible sense of smell and slight hearing.
From a distance, I like to watch the bees murmuring around but my idiot human disturbs them often, delving into the hives trying to see what’s going on instead of listening to them.
During the summer Ruff continues to look at the bees every week, sometimes adding yet another box to the bee home. there are a lot more bees now and sometimes he messes around with them and makes another smaller box of bees. Anyway I am once again lying in the cool of the long grass when again I hear a commotion this time from a small box. Again bees come out, not a big lot, one has quite a different sound to its flying, more of a whirr, and they fly out across the field. Remaining bees in the box are assembled on the outside with their stinging bits in the air fanning air and making quite a curious smell. After a short duration, it might have been long, I was asleep! the little cloud of bees returned, I presumed to their box but bizarrely there was another big box a few feet away where the bees also had their stingers up fanning away. In a great commotion the cloud of bees went into this hive instead. My human will never know about this as he was inside drinking some fizzy drink out of a tin which is a precursor to his lunch.
Towards the end of the summer it seems that a lot of the top boxes must be taken from the hives, this is really not good news the long grass was no longer a safe haven. My hearing is pretty average, the humans is non existent, I can hear an angry bee from a long way away and know when it’s time to find my safe haven. My bedroom was the place to go, Ruff calls it the kitchen. When I get there it’s chaos: all those boxes that were removed from the hives are in here, plus a few bees, Ruff the baldy is taking bits out of the boxes and putting them into this big spin dryer, spilling bits of sticky stuff on the floor as he goes. I pad around my room trying to find a safe place when Mrs Ruff screeches out (trust me she can screech), “Harry, get out”, “look at the mess you are making on the floor”! Well the insult,I couldn’t believe it! I didn’t put the sticky stuff on the floor but the advice to go outside with rabid bees seemed like a safer option.
Hiding in some long grass well away from ,house, bees and Mrs Ruff I settle down to licking the disgusting sticky stuff from my feet and reflect that a dogs life is not perfect but it has to be better than a human beekeepers.

24/11/2024

Storm Bert and the bees are flying.

03/11/2024

Article I recently put in a local bee association magazine.

Bees and Buffoons.

The bees crawled under the veil, gently tip toed up, came to the eyes and dug in. Ten thousand bees swirled around the perimeter of the veil looking to follow; the veil wasn’t coming off any time soon. Tim was getting stung. He was an arrogant bully on a good day, he had decided to keep bees. Rough treatment didn’t seem to be working with these bees: they weren’t happy. There was only one thing to do and Tim my brother in law did it; he ran!
Tim didn’t didn't see the funny side: actually he didn’t see anything for a week. He sold his bees. Call it schadenfreude but that was the moment I resolved to keep bees. in Ireland i was doing the typical self sufficiency thing: loads of vegetables, chickens, geese (who ate all the seedlings as soon as they came up), and a house cow in the field across the road. New beekeepers tend to be cautious and suit up well and I was no exception, no stupid mistakes then. I religiously did weekly inspections on my first hive sheltered under a big old Cyprus tree in the front garden. Inevitably at the end of July the bees were a bit stroppy, not majorly so but honey flow was at an end so just at the bump off the veil stage. I finished the totally unnecessary inspection, looked up to see Alice, our Kerry house cow, doing a credible imitation of Red Rum (race horse, three times winner of the grand national) disappearing half a mile down the road.
Fetching back a good old Frisian Holstein is a low input activity: did I mention Alice going like a race horse? That cow had more in common with a steeple chaser than any bovine milk machine. The rest of my afternoon was taken up with the chase, first on foot and then with the dubious aid of my ten year olds bike. Worse was to come with the evening milking and an udder that had obviously been stung, we were not a happy cow and she could certainly kick. Still after super the strawberries, clotted cream and honey was so delicious.
One of the many jobs I did that summer was to look after my friends house whilst he went to America for a month. I was employed to mow his lawn, w**d the garden and check his bees all this in one day a week. I will admit that my bee inspections would be quite rushed. On one occasion it was a “grand soft day”, (100% humidity, anywhere else in the word it would be torrential rain), I tore gobbets of turf out of the lawn mowing it before going around the bees. They were not impressed with the weather or it’s entrance into the hive as I did the quick inspection.
The next week the weather was improved and the bees were making swarming preparations but they had remembered my previous tardy treatment. I had forgotten my boots and as I opened each hive bees poured out hell bent on exacting revenge. Let me tell you Woolley socks are pure joy to a rabid bee. I am not a fan of the daily mail but stuffed down the socks I was saved from the worst excesses of mellifera mellifera.
No more silly mistakes for a few years until one warm summers day and a swarm. Why is it the books talk about them settling in a convenient tree? My tree was far from convenient, the swarm was about 14 foot up and on the end of a limb. Still warm sunny day should be no problem. The ladder came out but I wasn’t able to reach out under the swarm. Being a resourceful sort of guy I thought to just cut the branch off to retrieve the bees. The last thing I said to my wife from my perch up the ladder before all hell broke loose was, “you don’t think this branch will be too heavy do you”.
It was too heavy by a long way and plummeted to the ground. I mentioned a hot day: it was very hot, I was in shorts and tee shirt and had just thrown twenty thousand bees to the ground. For a moment I paused on the ladder in the naive hope that the bees would think I was part of the tree. Not more than 2 seconds latter the first sting came closely followed by the main raiding party. My only route to safety was down the ladder, through the maelstrom of bees, just as well I was not wearing much more than running gear then. I sped through the garden yelling to a now non existent audience to , “grab a hose, help”. Entering the back door of the house I grabbed the dogs bed to wrap around my head and raced upstairs to the shower. Water poured blissfully over me, bees like gravel in my hair, angry warriors disarmed washing out from under sodden clothing.
That day, or more correctly a couple of days later when I felt better it dawned on me that the thing that bees hate worst of all is a fool or a buffoon.
Time then to settle down to some more organised beekeeping and a little more thought.
When things are quiet I will do glove free manipulations but a couple of stings and the gloves go on rule. This is my way of keeping up my immunity topped up, like a covid injection it’s not perfect but it ameliorates the worst effects. Just as well really since I was stung on the eye yesterday just because I was too lazy to get my veil from the car when my friend wanted a hand with her bees: still an old fool then.
Malcolm.image0.jpeg

Address

Fuggles Apiary, Norton Lane, Norton. Nr Faversham
Sittingbourne
ME90EZ

Telephone

+447772172070

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Fuggles Apiary posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Shortcuts

Share

Category