Happy Christmas

This short blog is to wish everyone across the world a wonderful day today, Christmas 2025. Not everyone will celebrate in the same way, and for some it might be an ordinary working day. Whatever happens, I hope you can get your feet up at some point before the end of the year, review the past beekeeping year, and plan ahead for next season.

I want to send out a big thank you to everyone who read the blog posts this year and took the time to send comments. All the comments have been positive and polite and I’ve learned so much from many of them. One of the great things about communicating with beekeepers from all over the world is sharing a great store of collective knowledge. We have different pressures but the beekeeping problems are fundamentally the same, as are the joys and successes. The main pleasure for me is meeting people from around the world and having beekeeping friends in far off places. If you have overseas holidays planned for 2026 why not get in touch with some beekeepers through local beekeeping associations and try and arrange some apiary visits. I would love to feature more blogs about beekeeping in different countries and will welcome some holiday guest blogs.

This year was one of my best seasons and not just because of the great weather and honey flow. The simple act of counting daily the natural mature and immature varroa drops has led me to having a closer relationship with individual colonies and a much better understanding of what’s going on inside. I’ll be carrying on with that this year and working on improving the stock in my small apiary.