What we talk about
Sometimes it’s a guest who knows their subject better than almost anyone in the country. Sometimes it’s me picking apart a decision I got wrong last season and what it cost me. Either way we talk properly, and we don’t dress it up.
Everything gets explained in plain English. It’s the conversation you’d get if you turned up at the apiary with a flask and an hour to spare.
Over a year you’ll hear us get into:
- Seasonal management, and how to plan a year that doesn’t run away from you
- Swarm control and queen performance, including the calls that go badly
- Equipment choices, and what’s actually worth the money
- Honey production, from the flow through to the jar
- The realities of running a beekeeping business
- Where the industry’s heading, and what that means for the rest of us
Latest episodes
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Building a beekeeping business: two different paths
Building a beekeeping business can take very different paths. Explore the costs, opportunities and family trade-offs behind two businesses.
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Micro honey harvester: why I’d use one
Is the micro honey harvester right for you? I look at small-batch extraction, fresh honey tasting and the questions I’d ask before buying.
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Buckfast bee breeding: better bees with Lutz Eggert
Buckfast bee breeding with Lutz Eggert. Learn how health, drone selection and honest colony records can help you choose better bees.
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Scaling a beekeeping business: mistakes to avoid
Scaling a beekeeping business? Learn from my mistakes with equipment, workload and colony health before you invest in more hives.
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Their Job? Cover Matthew McConaughey in Bees.
Adam Hickman explains how five beekeepers trained Matthew McConaughey and filmed a 10-12lb live-bee scene as safely as possible.
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Are Buckfast bees still the best?
Grant compares hive-scale data from one Buckfast and one Obsidian colony, showing why weather, interventions and location matter more than a simple winner.
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50 bee colonies in year one. Now comes the hard part
A first-year beekeeper reflects on reaching 50 colonies, planning for honey, managing costs and choosing the work he wants to build into a business.
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I Broke My Own Beekeeping Rule. But It Proves The Point!
A practical autumn walkthrough: take treatment strips out, fit propolis traps, and use a cheap scale to learn what a winter-ready nuc feels like.
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Fake honey: the industrial fraud hiding in jars
Fake honey can contain 30% to 90% syrup. Learn how honey fraud works, how investigators expose it and how to buy real honey with confidence.
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Fake Honey Exposed
Honey fraud is flooding supermarket shelves with syrup. Here’s how one investigator got inside the trade, and how to buy real honey.
How to listen
Every episode is available for free via YouTube, but if you hate that ad-riddled experience, subscribing to HiveQ gets you it early and without those annoying ads.
The full conversation runs 35 to 40 minutes and the ad free, early access, lives inside HiveQ, our members’ community. That’s where it gets interesting. The tangents, the disagreements, and the bits we probably shouldn’t be saying out loud.
Your first month of HiveQ is free, so you can hear a full episode before you decide whether it’s for you.
We’ll ask for your card details when you start your free month. Cancel before the month is up and you won’t be charged anything.
HiveQ is our members’ community, and every full length episode lives in there. Your first month is free, so you can watch a full episode and have a proper look round before you pay a penny.
After that it’s £8.99 a month, and you can cancel whenever you like.
Honestly, the podcast is the smallest part of it. You also get:
- New videos weeks before they go public, with no ads
- A back catalogue of over 100 ad-free episodes to work through
- Seasonal advice at the point in the year you actually need it
- Over 610 beekeepers who’ll look at a photo of your frame and tell you what they think
We’re here every step of the way, and there are no silly questions.
