Our family journey to cultivate a suburban garden for sustainability, biodiversity, beauty, and joy
Despite the awful weather we’ve had this spring, our spring nucs with our home grown 2024 queens are doing brilliantly! These nucs are being picked up tomorrow morning, ready to grow into full size colonies at their new homes.
They’re such lovely bees we’ll be sad to see them go! 🐝
A buff-tailed bumblebee meets our honeybees!
Stacking up. Like all of us, our bees have been making the most of the recent fair and settled weather - and colonies are quickly growing taller!
These colonies are now running two brood boxes and a honey super each, plus a vertical split nuc on top 🐝
Hello, friend! 🐝
Honey delivery! 📦🍯
We’ve just dropped off another box of our Cranleigh honey to - pure and unprocessed golden goodness poured straight from our Flow Hives 🐝
That’s takes us to more than 100 jars of honey that now we’ve walked all of 300m down the street to the Moooh! store. Shop local, buy local, eat local!
Have you thought about rearing your own queens? 👑
The benefits of breeding from your own stock are significant, and it’s perhaps what we enjoy doing most during the beekeeping season!
We’re now breeding the fourth generation of queens from our line, naturally reared by the bees themselves - no grafting involved - with genetics we know and ever more adapted to our specific locality 🐝
Picture perfect! There’s a something of everything on this comb - capped brood, larva and eggs, all surrounded by a band of freshly foraged pollen and nectar 🐝
Sometimes you find something that puts words to something better than you can 💬
This has been our winter read, and we can’t recommend it enough. In the last year we’ve deliberately taken a slower, more hands off approach to our beekeeping. We’ve become intentionally self-sufficient for queens, for example, but we also found our mindset shifting for reasons we couldn’t fully articulate. And in so many ways, this book has helped us understand why.
Far away from the fast lane of mail order queens, magic supplements and artificial stimulative feeding, Eric and Joy provide a wonderful illustration of how a more sustainable approach can result in healthier and more resilient bees 🐝
It’s a brilliant read and we’re going to be some time putting it all into practice!
Our favourite ice cream store is open again! We can absolutely recommended the mini eggs flavour for the Easter weekend 🪺
And our Cranleigh honey on the shelves! This is as local as it gets - small-batch bee-kind honey from our Cranleigh bees 🐝
Our overwintered nucs are… busy! 🐝
With a sudden abundance of pollen amongst Cranleigh’s hedgerows, trees and gardens, our bees are grabbing any opportunity to forage. This can lead to moments of congestion at the hive entrance, where there’s simply not enough space through the front door for everyone!
These overwintered nucs and their 2023 queens will soon be going to their new homes. We’ve loved producing these new colonies with their naturally reared queens and hope that they will bring our customers many years of joy and fulfilment ❤️
We’re 100% Langstroth beekeepers which means our overwintered and spring nucs are perfect for Flow Hives and other Langstroth setups!
After days and days of endless rain, a short break in the weather this morning was the perfect opportunity to check up on our colonies ☀️
There are plenty of signs of spring around, not least the sight of our bees bringing this bright yellow-orange pollen back to the hives. There’s a good chance this is willow pollen, a vital source of protein and other nutrients that the colony will use to help rear new bees in the weeks ahead 🐝
We can feel the quiet of winter gently slipping away, and it won’t be long now until before these colonies are expanding at astonishing rates!
It’s now six months since the summer honey harvest season of 2023 ☀️
Our Flow Hives make it so incredibly easy. Pouring honey straight from the hive means we’re blessed to harvest honey is it’s rawest and most natural form, and most importantly with minimal interference to the bees that have crafted it 🐝
Winter may still be far from over, but we can’t help but get excited about turning the handles on our Flow Hives again, six months from now! 🍯
Poised for spring - two of our Flow Hives safely strapped down and waiting patiently to see what nectar 2024 will deliver!
We’ve always overwintered our 8-frame Flow Hives on single brood boxes. But inspired by we’re giving double brood a trial this winter.
It means more space for winter stores and growth in spring, but in the middle of a cold snap such as this, it also means more space for the bees to keep warm. We’re looking forward to seeing how the bees build up in the months ahead! 🐝
As the afternoon light fades on 2023 there’s time to make one last check on the bees. We’ve had phenomenal wind and rain in recent days and it’s a relief to find every colony still has a roof on top!
Thank you to all those who have supported us in the last 12 months. Happy new year! 🐝🙁
It’s the winter solstice today, and as of tomorrow bee hives across the northern hemisphere will be noticing the increasing daylight ☀️
It’s just one of many signals that colonies use to sense the onset of spring and begin that all important spring build up 🐝
Incredibly, it means we’re now only 6 months away from the first honey harvests of 2024, and more photos of capped honey like this! 🍯
As 100% Flow Hive beekeepers we don’t produce many wooden honey frames at all, but we do love the versatility of our Hybrid supers which means we still get to enjoy harvesting honey the traditional way.
Local honey! 🍯
Yesterday we made another delivery of our bee-kind Surrey Hills honey to on Cranleigh High Street.
Our Three Brothers honey sits on the shelf amongst a variety of other wonderful local honeys - plenty of choice for the discerning customer!
Playing with the light as we prepare another delivery of our Surrey Hills honey 🍯
A wonderful reminder of summer as autumn knocks at the door outside! 🍂
A lazy afternoon pouring honey straight from the hive. No mess and no stress… we love our Flow Hives! 🍯🐝
Don’t forget, new larger 340g jars of our Cranleigh pure honey now in stock on the high street 🍯
Freshly poured from our Flow Hives with minimum disturbance to our bees, this new season honey is as local and as bee-kind as it gets!
Two sides of beekeeping…
A wonderful laying pattern from a new 2023 queen on fresh, naturally drawn comb, and… uh oh… what’s going on here then?!
We have some news! ‼️
Keen followers may have noticed that this spring we’ve grown from a single apiary to three! 🥉
As such we’re delighted to let you know that our 227g jars of Surrey Hills pure honey are now available crafted by our honeybees in three different locations - Cranleigh, Rowly and Shamley Green!
You can pre-order through our website (local delivery is free!), and of course you can also pick up a jar of our Cranleigh honey at and
Sometimes you have to look backwards to move forwards…
One of hives recently developed a distinctly grumpy trait, and despite a variety of attempts to cheer them up, last week we decided it was time to requeen the colony.
Historically we’ve always introduced new queens very slowly and cautiously, but on this occasion we used a method described in an article written in 1952 by Brother Adam. He advocated that requeening a hive was more a case of a quick ‘substitution’ than it was protracted process of replacement.
The process: take a nuc with a young but established queen, pop the lid and expose it to the light. Meanwhile, remove the old queen from the troublesome hive, as well as the middle four frames from the brood nest.
In their place, gently drop four frames from the donor nuc, including the new queen surrounded by her own bees. Wait 5-10 mins before closing up the hive, and you’re done!
We weren’t at all sure what to expect, but this weekend we were chuffed to fine the new queen happily on the throne in her new colony, and the temperament of her bees already markedly better.
Checking up on our nuc colonies, some of which we’ve raised in these homemade paired-nuc boxes.
They were a winter project for us, taking standard 10-frame Langstroth brood boxes bought in the winter sale, and then splicing them in two to create two 4-frame nuc boxes that sit on the footprint of our 8-frame Flow Hives.
The beauty of vertical nucs means we need less space in our apiaries, and for early spring splits, we can use the warmth of the mother colony beneath to assist the nucs above.
We’ve now started off a dozen or so nucs in these boxes, before moving the colonies into larger boxes in due course.
And with the taps now fully open on the summer nectar flow, we’re even using pairs of our youngest nucs to fill a single Flow Hive super above! 🍯
As long as a queen excluder is place to stop the two queens interacting, the bees from two separate colonies will work together quite happily on the shared super on top 🐝
Our girls were such a hit at last week. We loved sharing a little insight into how their world works with these inquisitive, engaged children.
We were asked great questions all day; how many boyfriends does the Queen have? Which flowers are the bees’ favourites? How do the bees know where to go?…. What would you ask?
A first for us - school visits with our observation hive! 🐝👀
Last week we visited two local primary schools and it was a real privilege to talk bees with a couple of hundred school children.
Of course the real highlights were queen spotting through the window, and honey tasting! 🍯
A big shout out to for producing such a fantastic observation nuc for us!
Stop press! ‼️ We’re incredibly excited to announce that this season we are offering our honey in both 227g and 340g jars! Available now via our website: threebrothers.garden or on the high street and
We’re proud that our honey is as bee-kind as it comes; using Flow Hive technology our honey harvest is poured straight from the hive with minimal disturbance to our beautiful honey bees. We don’t fiddle about with it so this Surrey Hills foraged honey is as pure as the bees intended.
It’s always a joy to see honeybees out on our street. This one is too dark to be one of ours, so a visitor from elsewhere enjoying the white lavender a few doors down 🐝
New season 2023 local honey available to pre-order now! Click through to our website for more details - link in bio.
Apart from the playgrounds, the walks, the wild bees, the ‘beach’ and of course and , this our favourite thing about Knowle Park ❤️
Wildflower meadow update 🌼☀️🐝
It’s been three months since we handed over about one sixth of the garden to wildflowers, and the results so far have been… reasonable!
The cornflowers have taken very well, but unfortunately the underlying grass grew back very quickly with all rain in April, and is still very much in charge!
We’re looking forward to finding out what else flowers during the summer months ahead, with a view to then starting over again in the autumn - clearing the turf and sowing next year’s seeds before winter arrives.
Every day is a school day!
Cranleigh
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