The Bees.
Six hives on the south edge of the wildflower ground. They produce honey which is sold as Bee Juice at £12.20 a jar, because normal farms sell honey and this one does not.
- At
- 2.5 miles
- Hives
- Six
- Product
- Bee Juice, £12.20
What is here.
The hives face south-east so the sun gets to the entrance early, which gets the colony flying earlier in the day than it otherwise would. That is the entire siting logic and it matters more than anything else about the position.
A colony works an area of roughly three miles in every direction, which on this estate takes in the wildflower ground, the margins, the oilseed rape when there is any, and a good deal of somebody else’s hedgerow.
Hive four has a camera ninety centimetres from its landing board. Counting the traffic at an entrance turns out to be a genuinely good measure of whether a colony is any good, which is the sort of thing beekeepers have known for two hundred years and websites have only just discovered.
What happened here.
The hives were among the first things established here, before the shop got serious and long before the brewery. Honey is the classic small-farm value-add: low capital, high margin, and it keeps.
Bee Juice has twenty-seven reviews in the shop and is the premium ambient line. The name was not our idea and we would not have improved on it.
- At
- 2.5 miles
- Hives
- Six
- Product
- Bee Juice, £12.20
What it costs to keep.
The Bees
- A hive, set up
- £300 to £450Boxes, frames, foundation and a colony.
- Running, per hive per year
- £40 to £80Frames, foundation, treatment and feed.
- Bee Juice
- £12.20 a jarTwenty-seven reviews, and the premium ambient line.
- Foraging radius
- About three milesMost of which is not our land.
Costs are indicative ranges for work of this kind in this part of the country, not invoices. Where a figure is a published estate number rather than a general one, it says so in the row.
What to look at, while you are here.
The landing board
Traffic here is the honest measure of a colony. Count for thirty seconds.
The aspect
South-east. It gets them flying earlier, which is the whole siting decision.
The wildflower ground
Two fields away, taken out of production on purpose, and paid for.
The close camera
Ninety centimetres from the board, and the only macro camera on the estate.
The Bees, in the season it looks best. It does not look like this in February, and the walk changes plates when the real season at OX7 does.
Further along.
The Unfarmed
Margins, hedges, woodland edge and the corners a combine cannot reach. Under conventional management this is waste ground. On the…
The Lambing Shed
Four pens, a creep, a heat lamp and a camera. For six weeks in spring it is the most watched…
The Brewery
The walk cheats here. The brewery is not on this farm and never has been. We have stitched it on…
The Pub
The Farmer’s Dog, which is five miles down the road and not on this walk in any honest geographical sense.…
Watch this bit live instead.
There is a camera on or near this stop, running all year, with no audio and no zoom.
