Myst-Tree Rainford Honey

20/06/2026

Time for a game of Spot the Queen 👑🐝

There are workers, drones and one queen wandering around on this frame… but can you find her?

A few clues:

Workers are the smaller bees making up most of the crowd. They’re slimmer, busy, and usually look like they’ve got somewhere important to be.

Drones are chunkier, rounder, and have enormous eyes that nearly meet on top of their heads. Basically the big lads loitering about waiting for lunch.

The queen usually has a much longer, more tapered abdomen than the others. Her legs can look longer too, and she often moves more steadily through the workers while they part around her.

She isn’t always as obvious as people expect, especially when there are hundreds of bees milling about.

Have a proper look and let me know in the comments if you spotted her, and roughly where she is before someone else ruins it for you.

Good luck 🙂

19/06/2026

More hives doesn’t always mean more honey 🐝

I recently had a little disagreement with another beekeeper about whether lots of smaller colonies or one enormous colony is better for producing honey.

Now, I know what you’re thinking:

“What… beekeepers arguing over technically unimportant information?”

Yes, dear reader. We do that far more often than anyone would like to admit.

This is one of my production hives. It started the year as an overwintered nuc and has now grown into this absolute tower, which is currently doing a fairly convincing job of dwarfing me.

Yes, you may be thinking:

“Big whoop, Greg. I’ve seen you around the village. You’re vertically challenged.”

Whilst that may be true, I’m actually standing on a step here so I can reach the top supers with my little noodle arms.

The point is, more colonies don’t automatically mean more honey.

A few strong, healthy and well-managed colonies can sometimes outperform a much larger number of weaker or neglected ones. Bigger numbers might sound impressive and professional, but the strength and condition of each colony matter far more than how many buzzing boxes you can count.

Quality over quantity.

Although in this case, apparently also height over dignity.

19/06/2026

Just look at this bloody thing of beauty!

If you know me then you know I have a lot of love for a good slush. Nostalgia is blue slushy tinted in my opinion.

Pick 'n' Mixers Rainford just told me that they're opening extra late tonight and the whole fathers day weekend. So if you see me in the village and I have a strange coloured tongue and brain freeze then you know why!

So as you all know... the slush machine went to the big shop in the sky a couple of weeks ago.

So we have changed it up... a new machine has arrived and instead of just offering red or blue, we now have 9 flavours for you to choose from! (10th coming soon!) 😍

Which will you be trying on your next visit?!

The cocktail slush are flavoured and contain zero alcohol (sorry if I got your hopes up!) Absolutely delicious though 👌

18/06/2026

The end of Myst~Tree Honey?! 🍯

A friend over at Herd & Hive uploaded a video called “The End of Myst~Tree Honey” about the EU’s new honey-labelling rules.

Naturally, I saw the title, panicked, assumed my entire business had collapsed overnight without me knowing...

Thankfully, it’s actually excellent news.

Under the new EU rules, blended honey labels must clearly name the countries the honey came from, in order of how much is present, along with the percentage contributed by each country.

That means customers will be able to see whether a jar contains honey from one country or a mixture gathered from several places across the world.

At the moment, labels in Great Britain can simply say something vague like “blend of honeys from more than one country”.

That tells you virtually nothing.

It could contain honey from two countries or ten. One country might make up nearly the whole jar, or only a tiny amount. The customer has no practical way of knowing.

Imported honey isn’t automatically bad, and this isn’t about pretending only British honey is worthwhile. It’s about allowing people to make an informed choice and making it harder to hide poor-quality or questionable honey behind deliberately vague wording.

Clearer labels would:

🐝 Give customers proper information about what they’re buying
🍯 Make genuine British and local honey easier to identify
🔍 Improve traceability and help combat honey fraud
🏷️ Stop vague origin statements doing all the heavy lifting
👨‍🌾 Give honest producers a fairer chance to compete

Honey is one of the world’s most adulterated foods, so greater transparency is long overdue.

I really hope the UK adopts equivalent rules. If a business knows where its honey came from and what proportion came from each country, why shouldn’t the customer know too?

Anyway, Myst~Tree Honey isn’t ending.

I’m still here.
Slightly shaken.
No longer hiding.

14/06/2026

The latest short form video is now up 🐝

This one is a little longer than my usual “short” form videos, mainly because there was an awful lot that needed doing and apparently I have a very flexible understanding of the word short.

After last week’s battle with the aggressive colonies, I’m back with a new veil and six new queens from an Aberdeen bee breeder: three F1 Buckfast queens and three Aberdeen AMM queens.

In the video, I check that the banked queens are alive and being looked after, remove problem queens, knock down unwanted queen cells, move a couple of small colonies into nuc boxes, and begin introducing the new queens into the hives that need them.

Some could be released through the fondant straight away, while others needed to remain safely caged until the colonies were properly queenless. Queen introduction is one of those jobs where rushing can turn an expensive new queen into a very small and disappointing co**se.

The angry bees are still very much angry for now, as the existing workers won’t disappear overnight, but hopefully the new queens will gradually produce much calmer colonies over the next six to eight weeks.

There are plenty of bees, a surprising amount of queen-based admin, and another thorough test of whether my new veil was worth buying.

Hope you enjoy it!

This is a slightly longer short form video because there was a lot ...

12/06/2026

After nearly 2 years… I finally have a TikTok Shop 🐝🍯

I’ve been meaning to sort this for absolutely ages, and I’ve finally managed to get Myst~Tree Honey onto TikTok Shop.

There’s only one item on there at the moment — our medium 227g jar of honey — because apparently I’m choosing to start small rather than immediately create another admin-based monster for myself.

But I thought I’d let you know.

So if you use TikTok and you’d like to support Myst~Tree without leaving the app, you can now order a jar directly through there.

Tiny shop.
Proper honey.
Mildly overwhelmed beekeeper.

I’ll hopefully add more products soon once I’ve figured out what I’m doing and stopped staring blankly at product listing forms.

Thanks as always for supporting this little bee-fuelled chaos machine.

12/06/2026

“Why has my honey gone solid?” 🍯

A few questions I’ve had recently:

“Why is my honey going solid?”
“Has it gone off?”
“Do I need to throw it away?”

Good news: no, your honey hasn’t gone off, and please don’t throw it away.

Honey crystallising is completely natural. In fact, it’s often a sign that you’ve got proper honey that hasn’t been messed about with too much. Different honeys crystallise at different speeds depending on the flowers the bees have been visiting, the natural sugars in the honey, temperature, and how it’s stored.

Some jars stay runny for ages. Some start setting much quicker. Bees, as ever, refuse to follow a neat customer service policy.

I’ve written a blog post explaining what crystallisation is, why it happens, and the different ways you can gently return your honey to a runny state without ruining it.

You can read it here:

https://www.mysttree.com/post/s3-e8-crystallisation

Enjoy 🙂

Why does honey go solid? How can we get it back to its lovely runny state? All is answered here.

11/06/2026

What do bees do when it rains? 🐝🌧️

Mostly, they stay inside and wait for the weather to stop being ridiculous.

Heavy rain puts a stop to most foraging because honeybees are tiny, winged creatures, not waterproof helicopters. A bit of drizzle is one thing, but proper heavy rain makes flying difficult, risky, and generally not worth the effort.

But that doesn’t mean the hive shuts down.

Inside the colony, the bees are still busy. They’re feeding larvae, looking after the queen, cleaning cells, processing nectar, moving food around, guarding the entrance, regulating temperature, and generally keeping the whole tiny buzzing machine running.

If foragers get caught out in bad weather, they may shelter under leaves, flowers, stems or anything else they can tuck themselves under until there’s a break in the rain. Then, when the weather eases, they’ll make a dash back home.

Very relatable, really.

Sometimes the best plan is to stay inside, keep things ticking over, and wait for the nonsense outside to calm down.

ApiaryLife RainyDay Nature MystTreeHoney

07/06/2026

Latest short form video is up 🐝

This one is from the inspection where I had to deal with a colony that had become far too aggressive to leave alone.

There’s a big difference between bees defending their home and bees actively hunting you down, and these had gone well past the “please leave” stage and into “we have formed a tiny striped militia” territory.

In the video, I start breaking the colony down so the flying bees return to the original position, making it easier to find the queen later and start the process of requeening them with calmer genetics.

There are stings, a failing bee suit, and a very questionable bit of emergency veil engineering.

Hope you enjoy it!

In this short form video, I’m dealing with a colony that has become...