Welcome to Estelle Hives, home of The Dancing Bees

Welcome to Estelle Hives, our family-run business on the Kent/Surrey/Sussex borders. Steve is the beekeeper with a passion for managing bees in as natural way as possible, while Dani develops and produces a range of products from the other natural bounty of the hive – wax and propolis.

Steve started his beekeeping journey while still at school in North Yorkshire, joining the beekeeping club and helping manage the colonies in the school’s orchard before moving them up to the North York Moors for the heather flowering season. This was before varroa arrived in the UK and well before the threat of yellow-legged hornets, and beekeeping was a simpler pastime. He still remembers the first time he cut a slice of comb honey and spread it across freshly-made, warm bread – pure bliss made all the better by knowing he’d helped the bees with their endeavours and was only taking honey they could spare.

His further education, career in London and starting a family then meant a long hiatus of several decades! When Dani presented him with a hive and suit for one of his major birthdays (we won’t say which one), his interest was re-ignited.

He was lucky to sign up to Westerham Beekeepers, an amazing beekeeping club in west Kent that not only provided him with a solid year of training in the club’s training apiary and the knowledge to pass his BBKA basic, but also access to beekeeping mentors at the forefront of developing treatment-free beekeeping.

Those early years re-exploring beekeeping, its many characters, and its opportunities got him thinking. Could he make beekeeping a career, or at least half a career?

And so Estelle Hives, home of The Dancing Bees, was born. A truly family affair putting bees first. The Dancing Bees, named after the waggle dance that bees perform to alert their peers to sources of nectar and pollen, is our trading brand for our honeys and hive products. Dani’s not yet a beekeeper, but she loves creating The Dancing Bees products from the completely natural resources of the hives.

At the heart of the business are our Dancing Bees. We put them first and we want to be part of creating a more sustainable UK bee sector for the future.

We therefore practise treatment-free beekeeping – that means we don’t treat our colonies with miticides or other chemical treatments for the varroa mite, instead selecting and breeding from colonies that are naturally resistant and manage the mites themselves. We believe this is crucial for the sustainability of beekeeping in the UK – mites become resistant to treatments over time, and humans cannot be propping up bee colonies just for their own gain. Bees are an incredibly important part of the wider ecosystem and need to be able to sustain themselves.

Secondly, we will never, ever import bees just to boost honey production. The British bee, incorrectly thought to have been wiped out but already heavily hybridised after decades of imports of other strains of honeybee, needs to be protected and preserved. It is adapted to our climate and environment, it can survive our winters and other times of forage dearth, it won’t bring new pests and diseases with it like the imports may do, and it is our native bee.

We’ll talk a lot more about these two topics in future blog posts because we’re passionate about them and they are at the centre of what Estelle Hives and its Dancing Bee products are about. So welcome to our little business – we hope you agree with our ethos and we hope very much that you enjoy the incredible and natural products from our Dancing Bees!