Our Story
The BroadBees Family
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Adrian
Beekeeper and Production manager
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Harry
Beekeeper, Procurement Lead, Head of Marketing & Product Development
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Karen
Product Development and Production
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Jack
Production Assistant and Quality Assurance
How it all began…
BroadBees began over a decade ago, initially, long before it was known as BroadBees, with Adrian Broadhead. A keen gardener, Adrian undertook a beekeeping course, out of sheer interest in bees and the environment. A love of beekeeping quickly bloomed into a family affair, with Harry also becoming a beekeeper. Originally our beekeeping was very small scale, maintaining a couple of hives, with honey for personal use and some to sell to friends. Over time as our interest has grown so have our hive numbers, currently numbering over 20 and expanding year on year. As we continue to grow, our priorities are unchanged from when we began, we strive to run an ethical, environmentally sustainable family business, producing the finest Yorkshire honey.
Our Ethical Commitment
At BroadBees we have a strong commitment to practicing beekeeping in a responsible manner, always placing the Bees welfare above all else.
Never clipping Queen Bees wings to suppress honeybees natural behaviour
Always ensuring enough honey is left for the bees to sustain themselves overwinter, and only giving supplemental feeding when truly needed
Maintaining strict biosecurity measures to prevent disease propogation and spread
Only using sustainably sourced wooden beehives - no plastic or imported beehives
Only tending to locally british raised honeybees - never importing honeybees from abroad, which risks global disease and parasite spread
Utilising only our own independently produced Queen Bees, in order to assure high standards of ethical and sustainable Queen rearing
Taking an individual approach to the care of each and every hive - with regular inspections and only interveneing when needed for the colonies welfare
Environmental Pledge
We adhere to a strict biosecurity procedure to prevent disease/parasite spread between our apiaries. These steps include separate equipment for different sites, careful disinfection of any equipment which is taken between sites, and appropriate disposal of any biological waste.
Habitat creation pledge - at all of our apiary sites we plant a variety of pollinator friendly plants for both our honeybees and the local pollinator population.
By limiting the number of our beehives concentrated in any apiary we reduce the level of competition our honeybees pose to local pollinators so are honeybees supplement the local pollinators, not subtract.
In order to limit the environmental impact of our work we have a tree planting promise, for the carbon we produce we fund the planting of trees to offset our carbon footprint.
All our orders are carefully packaged in plastic free packaging.