Welcome to “Straight from the Hive” Edmondsham Honey
Based in Dorset the bees have been living here for well over 40 years, we have been lucky enough to be involved in the adoption of these great bees and hope to bring them back to there hay day levels!

Our bee keeping interest began when we moved into the village and on a warm summers day in June, a swarm landed in our garden. Instantly we were intrigued watching them with fascination.  We realised that they had come from our chimney, so we called our local bee keeper assotioation number and they sent a bee keeper  out to collect them ,with out any bother or fuss however we pointed out the chimney bees he said if they were not causing a problem we should them bee. .. Scuse the pun*

“They probably leave the first time we light the fire anyway..”

They didn’t leave and this became a regular occurrence every summer we would often get one or 2 swarms congregating in our garden. We would call the local bee association and they would arrange for a keeper to come and collect them! And untill the bee keeper would come out we would watch and observe them in there cluster till the bee keeper would come along in the evening and re-home them.

And then lock down happened…..
Our interest in bees had peaked the previous year with enquires into buying a hive (but nothing serious)…
Now we are in full swing lockdown and the bees are back, we wondered if perhaps we could house these ones!
But we needed to know what to do and apparently equipment, we’d heard that an elderly neighbour in the village used to keep bees so at a distance and masked we chatted over the fence!
He said there was an orchard nearby where he uses too keep bees and if any of the old hives were salvageable perhaps we could use one of them.

We rushed off to where he said this “orchard” was..

The Orchard.. was not far from us, very overgrown and dotted around were old neglected hives, initially spotting 1 or 2 then realising there were more amongst the undergrowth.
We went from hive to hive but… they were in a state, although one appeared to still have the odd bee going in and out of it!
Unfortunately it had been sometime since they had been serviced and there was no chance of using any of the hives for the swarm in the garden.
We had to admit defeat rung through some bee keepers till we found one who would (at a distance!) take away the bees.
But that was it we were set we were going to get and do the bee thing, and eventually become bee keepers!

The bug was biting we wanted to get involved we registered and completed a buigners oline online bee course and registered with the East Dorset bee keepers assiation and got started!

In 2021 we got Bees.. lots of Bees