By: Richard Wahl
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Black Mountain Honey
Intro
This past January 2026, I attended the third annual North American Bee Expo at the Louisville, Kentucky, Expo Center. Along with approximately 150 vendors, a honey and beekeeping contest room, and a Honey Bar showcasing an impressive variety of regional honeys from across the United States and North America, the three-day event featured several dozen speakers. I attended as many of the thirty speaking sessions as possible, although that proved to be a bit of a logistical challenge since four or five speaker tracks were taking place simultaneously. It was fairly impossible for me to be in four places at once. In my opinion, one of the best presenters at the event was Laurence Edwards of North Wales, UK, who gave two very informative seminars. I had the good fortune to meet Mr. Edwards while wandering through the vendor hall and asked if he would be willing to let me interview him for a possible future publication in Bee Culture. Fortunately, he agreed, and the result of that Summer conversation follows. The questions I asked are organized by topic, followed by Laurence Edwards’ answers. As you might expect when interviewing a beekeeper from across the pond, you will occasionally encounter a few British spellings. Part two will appear in next month’s issue.
Getting to Know the Beekeeper
Q. How did you first become interested in beekeeping
and how long have you been keeping bees?
A. I first became interested in beekeeping in about 2013, when a huge swarm of bees landed in my garden. I’d been playing rugby, came home at about five o’clock, and there was this great cloud of bees in the air. They clustered up in a tree and we both stood there thinking, “What on earth is going on here?” It turned out there was a beekeeper two doors down. There’s always a beekeeper somewhere nearby, isn’t there? He came round, collected the swarm and took it away. I thought it was amazing for about ten minutes; then we went for a curry and forgot about it. The exact same thing happened the following weekend. Except, he looked a bit embarrassed this time because it was the same time, same tree, same beekeeper, and it looked as though he could not control the bees. I asked whether I could keep them in the garden. He said yes, bumped them into a box, and that was how I got started. I’ve been keeping bees for about 13 years now.
Q. Approximately how many colonies do you
currently manage at how many apiary locations?
A. That has changed a lot as the business has changed. When I was building Black Mountain Honey alongside my job as a project manager, I had bees spread over quite a few apiaries. At one point I probably had six, seven, maybe even ten different sites, usually with six to twelve colonies in each. These days we’ve compressed that down. I only really manage my own bees across three main apiary sites now, and we also work with other beekeepers who produce bees for us in some really good isolated locations in Wales. Across Black Mountain Honey, including production colonies and nucs, there are around 2,000 colonies under management. Nucs are a huge part of the business now. Our main focus is producing calm, healthy starter colonies for beekeepers across the UK.
Q. What do you enjoy most about beekeeping today?
A. It’s probably not the answer people expect, because it’s not really about the bees. The bit I enjoy most now is seeing the impact beekeeping has on other people. Someone comes to collect a nuc, usually nervous and excited, and says they’ve watched the videos and this is finally their year to start. We give them the bees, talk them through the basics, and off they go. Then, a few months later, I’ll get a message saying, “I picked up a nuc from you earlier this year. The bees are lovely, my family loves it, we’ve even got some honey, and it’s brought us so much happiness.” That gets me every time. Watching beekeeping make people happy is the best bit. It really is magnificent.
For Beginning Beekeepers
Q. If you could teach a beginner only three things
during their first year, what would they be?
A. The first thing would be how to inspect a colony properly. That sounds basic, but it’s everything; how to open the hive, how to use the hive tool, how to make space, how to handle frames, how to protect the queen, and how to know what good looks like. Beekeeping is an information exchange. The bees are telling you things all the time, but you need to know how to read it. The second thing would be how to diagnose queen problems without guessing. So many beginners say, “I think I’m queenless,” when really they don’t know. That’s dangerous, because then they start throwing solutions at a colony that might not need them. I’d teach them to prove it. Add a frame of eggs. If the colony is hopelessly queenless, they’ll usually tell you by drawing emergency queen cells. The bees give you the answer if you ask the question properly. The third thing would be to stop focusing on honey. If you focus on honey too early, it drives the wrong behaviour. Focus on keeping the bees healthy, well-managed and strong. The honey will follow. (R. Wahl note: Laurence commented in my edit request, “These physical skills need to be demonstrated in person or by video, or supported with diagrams if covered in print. This is one of the reasons we created the Black Mountain Honey YouTube course – to show beginners how to do these things properly.”)
Q. What’s one piece of advice you wish someone had given you when you started? Or what advice do you give to people thinking about getting their first hive?
A. Don’t invest in beekeeping on the basis of a dream. It’s very easy to look at beekeeping and think, “I could do this. I could leave the office, buy 200 hives, get an extractor, get an uncapping machine, and live this wonderful outdoor life.” Then you do it and realise you don’t actually like that version of beekeeping. By then you’ve bought all the kit and scaled the wrong thing. My advice is to grow organically. Try things on a small scale. Honey, nucs, queens, teaching, experiences, whatever interests you. Work out what you enjoy, what works, and what is actually scalable. If you scale the wrong thing, all you’ve done is scale the difficulty. For someone getting their first hive, I’d say, do your research before the bees arrive. Join a community, watch videos, ask questions and tell people your plan. You can avoid so many expensive mistakes by simply asking, “Does this sound sensible?”
Q. How often do you inspect your colonies
during the active season?
A. I’m a strong believer in weekly inspections during the main active season. We don’t start on a random calendar date. We start when the bees tell us they’re active, building up and starting to need space. In North Wales, that’s usually late March into early April, depending on the season. From there, we inspect weekly through April, May, June and most of July. I use two levels of inspection. A normal weekly inspection is targeted: I open the hive and remove enough frames to check space, food, eggs or other evidence of the queen, and swarm risk. Once I am satisfied the colony should be fine until the following week, I close it up. I do not inspect every frame each time. Separately, I carry out three full disease inspections each year, examining every frame closely, inch by inch, for signs that could be missed during routine swarm inspections. Here, ‘proper inspection’ means enough hands-on checking to manage swarming and confirm that the colony is likely to be fine until the next week. In the final few weeks of the honey season, I don’t really want to be tearing brood boxes apart. At that point I’m mostly managing space and adding supers if the bees need them. So in reality, it’s not hundreds of inspections. It might be fifteen proper inspections in a season.
Colony Management
Q. What management practices have given you
the greatest improvement in colony survival?
A. The biggest improvement came when I stopped focusing on honey and started focusing on bee health. Early on, I did what a lot of beekeepers do. I tried to get as much honey as possible, then treated the bees as an afterthought once I was happy with what was in the bucket. That sounds terrible now, but I think a lot of people fall into that trap. Changing that approach took my overwintering losses from around 30% to under 3%. For us, the key is treating at the right time. In North Wales, that means mid-August. I take the honey off a bit earlier than many people would, double-brood the colonies where needed, give them a feed, and put the Apivar strips in properly. Then I keep them topped up with syrup while they get ready for Winter. In October, I remove the strips and give the colonies their final feed once the Winter bees have been produced. That shift has made all the difference. Healthy bees give you honey. If you chase honey and neglect health, you lose both.
Q. What is your mite monitoring routine and
what treatment philosophy do you follow?
A. I used to monitor mites more formally. I tried keeping certain colonies untreated, tracking mite loads and selecting from colonies that seemed to cope better. In practice, I found I was still making the same decision. The healthy colonies were worth treating to keep them ahead of the curve, and the failing colonies were still failing. So now our treatment philosophy is simple. We run a planned two-part treatment regime that works for us. First, we treat in mid-August with Apivar. That gets mite levels down before the Winter bees are produced. Then, around Winter, we use oxalic acid when the colony is likely to be broodless. I don’t go by a fixed calendar date for the Winter treatment. I look for a proper cold spell. A sharp frost can shut brood rearing down. Three weeks later, you often have that small window where most of the mites are phoretic, sitting on the bees rather than sealed under cappings. That is the best time to hit them. You’re never going to kill every mite. The aim is to knock them back hard enough that the colony starts the next season with the race in its favour.
Q. What common mistakes do beekeepers
make with mite management?
A. The biggest mistakes are not treating, treating too late, or using treatments that don’t work. Timing is everything. A treatment that would have helped in August might be far too late in October if the damage has already been done to the Winter bees. I also see people using products that simply don’t have enough effect. That’s really frustrating, because the beekeeper thinks they’ve done the right thing, but the colony still goes into Winter with too many mites. My view is straightforward. Keep ahead of varroa. Don’t wait until the colony is already in trouble.
Q. Do you raise your own queens and what
qualities do you look for in a good queen?
A. Yes, we raise a lot of our own queens, and queen rearing is one of my favourite parts of beekeeping.
The number one quality for us is temperament. That surprises some people. They expect honey production to come first, but calm bees are our red line at Black Mountain Honey. If someone buys a nuc from us, I want them to enjoy beekeeping. I don’t want them getting chased around the garden by horrible bees. They’ll be happy with four supers of honey from calm bees. They won’t be happy with ten supers from bees they’re scared to open. After temperament, we look for health, good brood pattern, low swarming tendency, good productivity and colonies that are easy to work. If the bees aren’t calm, I’m going back to work on them some more. By ‘work on them some more’, I mean removing the queens and drones from colonies whose temperament or other traits are not up to standard, so those genetics are not carried forward. In practical terms, this means dispensing with the unsuitable queens and removing those drones from the breeding population.
Honey Production
Q. What management practices consistently
produce better honey crops?
A. For me, the biggest one is the Demaree. A lot of beginners think honey production is just a case of building a colony up, putting a queen excluder on, adding supers, and waiting. It can work like that, but the real art is in knowing when to step outside that simple pattern. The Demaree is a pre-emptive swarm control method. You give the queen space to lay while keeping the colony together under one roof. Done at the right time, it can massively reduce swarming and keep the workforce together for the honey flow. I had two similar colonies side by side this year. One had already swarmed before I got to it. The other was ready for a Demaree, so I did it. The swarmed colony produced about 40 pounds of honey. The Demareed colony produced about 160 pounds. That’s the difference good timing and good management can make. (R. Wahl note: I wrote an article on Demaree, titled, Vertical Splits, The Demaree Method which was published in the March 2026 issue of Bee Culture.)
Q. How do you determine the right time to harvest?
A. I let the health of the bees determine the harvest date. In the past, I might have asked, “Is the honey ready?” Now I ask, “When do these bees need treating to stay healthy?” For us, that’s usually around mid-August. This year it was around the 10th of August. That means the honey comes off then, because I need to get the Apivar strips in and I don’t want honey supers on during treatment. Most of the honey is ready by then. If there are a few uncapped frames, I’ll shake them. If nothing comes out, they can usually go into the crop, especially when you’re mixing a small number of uncapped frames with a large volume of capped honey. It means we take honey off a little earlier than some people, but it gives the bees the best chance of going into Winter healthy.
Intermission
The next North American Bee Expo will be held at the Louisville, Kentucky Expo Center this coming January 7-9, 2027. Check out their website at: “North American Bee Expo 2027” https://www.nahbexpo.com/ for a full list of speakers, vendors and programs. This concludes Part 1 of this interview. Next month I will continue Part 2 with additional media questions, a section on equipment usage, Laurence’s future plans and reflections, and a few “Off the Wahl” fun questions. See you next month for Part 2.
