Mister B's World Famous Blue Hive Honey 

Making honey since 2016

Our hives and us

About us

Mister B’s World Famous Blue Hive Honey is based in Bonn, Germany, and was brought into being by us, James B. and Ralph B., in 2015. We aim to have four mature bee colonies in our back garden (this depends on how many hives successfully make it through the winter). We enjoy learning about our bees and how a bee colony functions. Our goal is to produce top quality, natural honey from healthy bee colonies. 

How it all started

Why did we start keeping bees? Like many other beekeepers before us, we must confess that we were motivated by our fondness for honey. But to be honest, we also love the sound of bees buzzing in our garden. We’d noticed that since moving into our home in 2002, there seemed to be fewer bees around and our annual crop of apples from the tree in our garden appeared to be declining. Coupled with news reports of a general decline in bee numbers, we decided to do something. The obvious solution: become beekeepers ourselves!

The thought of becoming beekeepers was a bit scary. So we signed up for an almost year-long beekeeping course at the Duisburg Bee Museum where we were introduced to the key points of beekeeping, one Saturday a month. We were incredibly fortunate to be taught by Dr. Pia Aumeier and Dr. Gerhard Liebig, two of the leading beekeeping experts in Germany. The hands-on, practical approach of the course meant that from the very beginning we got to work with bees. Our anxieties quickly disappeared, replaced with a profound respect for these fascinating insects.

We received two ‘nucleus’ colonies (starter colonies comprising a queen bee, three frames of brood with bees, and two frames of honey) in mid-June 2015.

We raise new queens each year by making nucleus colonies in order to ‘re-queen’ our hives. This means that we have up to eight colonies in our garden each summer: four mature colonies, and four nucleus colonies.    

Our honey

Our bee colonies live in ‘Zander’ hives which are painted on the outside with blue, non-toxic, water-based paint, hence the name ‘Blue Hive Honey’. We harvested our first honey in 2016. In our part of the world there are typically two honey harvests a year: one at the end of spring and another at the end of summer. We tend to have just one harvest in late summer as the honey-harvesting process is quite time consuming, and it doesn’t really make sense to have two harvests for the small amount of honey that we produce each year.

Mister B’s World Famous Blue Hive Honey is available as creamy or runny honey. All of our honey is made by our own bees and is put into 250g and 500g glass jars by us with minimal processing. All we do is strain and stir the honey. That’s it.

What does our honey taste like? Delicious! What else. We’ve eaten our way through quite a few jars of our honey and we think you can really ‘taste’ the flowers. In our neighbourhood there’s a broad variety of trees, shrubs and flowers. The streets surrounding our house are lined with lime trees that flower in late May / early June and which are very much favoured by bees. The lime trees have a strong influence on the overall composition of our honey.  

Due to the small quantities of honey which we currently produce, Blue Hive Honey is not available for sale. Sorry about that!  

Our honey has been enjoyed by our family and friends in Asia, Europe, North America and South America making it truly ‘world famous’.

We – and our hard-working bees – hope to continue making delicious honey for many years to come.