Healthy heather crop comes to the rescue of Willie's bees

A surprisingly good crop of heather in the hills of north Northumberland and the Scottish Borders has come to the rescue of millions of honey bees after 10 weeks of rain stopped their foraging in fields and gardens and left some of them starving, according to one of the country’s leading commercial beekeepers.

Willie Robson, who runs Chain Bridge Honey Farm at Horncliffe, near Berwick-upon-Tweed, and keeps around 2,000 bee colonies within a 40-mile radius of the farm, said the wet weather through late June, July and into August, had confined his bees to their hives where, in many cases, they ate the honey they had collected in order to survive. Willie and his son Stephen also had to provide some of the bees with food to keep them alive.

"As we all know to our cost, it has been one of the worst summers in years, and the effect on our honey bees was nearly catastrophic," said Willie. "But they have been saved by the warmer weather of the past few days and by the fact that, because of the summer rain, the heather in the hills has been surprisingly good this year. Now most of the hives are bursting with honey and it looks as though we will end up with about half the normal year’s production. But it has been a close-run thing. Summers like this one happen around here only about once in ten years, and it is also very significant that wasps have had their worst year for a decade."

Willie added that plants other than heather which kept the bees alive were field beans, lime, ragwort, thistle and Himalayan balsam. "These will also have kept many other insects alive, including butterflies."

Previously good summers have enabled the honey farm to build up a reserve of many tons of honey, sales of which through the company’s 350 retail outlets, the farm’s popular visitor centre and on-line orders have reached record levels this year.


The family business, which was started by Willie’s father, William Selby Robson, in 1948, employs 15 people, including Willie and his wife Daphne, son Stephen and daughters Heather and Frances.