Our Story
Honeyfields Bee Farm is a family business which was founded in 1985 by Grenville & Gill Barber who took up keeping bees as a hobby in 1976. Starting out with a handful of WBC hives they soon saw that there was a market for producing honey on a large scale and made the decision to go in to business. In 1985 Grenville and Gill bought a piece of land in the Warwickshire countryside and began to expand their operation by first building a honey house and then a few years later a house to make Honeyfields Bee Farm their family home.
In 2006 Grenville and Gill’s eldest son Sam Barber started to work full time for Honeyfields Bee Farm. Growing up Sam was always fascinated by honey bees and when he was old enough had always helped with working on the bees in school holidays and weekends where needed, which was of huge benefit when Sam finally decided to go full time after university. For 6 months in 2008/09 Sam worked on a large bee farm in Australia. Sam was involved in large scale honey production, the breeding and production of queen bees for home demand and export to the USA and the production of colonies of bees to be exported to the USA. This experience gave Sam the vison to change the structure of the business by increasing Honey production and start producing Five Frame Nucs and Queen bees for sale.
With the market for honey and bees growing over the years Honeyfields Bee Farm has developed a team of part time and full-time staff to share the work load (Simon, John and Michael who are more like family than staff!) Members of staff work all year round and help out with equipment assembly/maintenance, beekeeping husbandry and honey extraction. More recently in 2021 Sam’s brother Thomas was invited to join the team, leaving a career as an accountant of around 12 years. Tom now assists with the management of the rapidly growing business.
At Honeyfields Bee Farm we produce pure English honey, colonies of bees and queen bees for sale. We sell and supply bees to other commercial beekeepers and hobbyist beekeepers throughout the spring and summer months. Our English honey is mainly sold in bulk to other beekeepers and honey packers. The rest of our honey is packed by ourselves and sold wholesale to local shops and retail through our website with delivery. Our colonies of bees are located throughout the Warwickshire countryside on various farms and on our own premises near Bulkington.
Each year we aim to breed high quality queen bees for sale in our nuclei and for sale separately. We feel that it is important to keep breeding queen bees in our local area. We also import queen bees from EU breeders for use in our own colonies, to breed with, and for resale. This keeps good genetic lines in our colonies, improving colony productivity.
Our plan for the future is to continue to expand the size of our operation, running more bees and employing more staff.
With over 30 years of beekeeping experience we feel we have good enough knowledge to help you with your needs. Although no year has been the same and new lessons are often learned.
Member of the Bee Farmers Association for over 20 years.