Bee Happy Honey

About Bee Happy Honey

Bee Happy Honey is the public face of Apiary Records Ltd (NI739315), a registered Northern Ireland company keeping the native dark honey bee, Apis mellifera mellifera, in rural County Antrim. We are a mother-daughter team based in the shadow of Slemish, and our work is centred on responsible, native-bee-first beekeeping at a careful, deliberate pace. Alongside the bees we write a beekeeping blog that records the season-by-season story of an upland Antrim apiary - what we learn, what surprises us, and what other beginner and intermediate beekeepers in Northern Ireland might find useful.

Our beekeeping operation is small and intentionally so. We keep colonies of native AMM bees on upland ground near Slemish, where the bees forage a diverse mix of County Antrim wildflowers, hedgerow blossoms, gorse, willow and heather. We are members of our local beekeeping association and continue our education through their courses and seasonal meetings. The blog covers the practical realities of keeping bees in Northern Ireland - equipment choices, inspection routines, swarm management, varroa monitoring, seasonal feeding, and the longer-term picture of supporting native bee populations on the island of Ireland.

Alongside the beekeeping, we are developing a hive-monitoring and record-keeping tool aimed at small-scale beekeepers who want to track colony health, inspection history and compliance records without the complexity or cost of commercial apiary management software. The product is in active private development and is not yet released for sale. Beta testing and early access will be announced through our blog and to members of our local beekeeping community first. Updates on the development progress are posted regularly on the blog as we work through prototypes and field trials with our own colonies.

Honey from our own colonies is not currently available for retail sale. Our priority during the early years of building the apiary is colony health, native-bee genetics and sustainable management rather than commercial yield. Small quantities of honey may become available to friends and our immediate community in season once colonies are fully established and we are confident we can supply consistently and to the standard we want. We will not list honey for general sale until that point, and any future sale will be made clear on our blog and in this profile so customers know exactly what they are buying and where it came from.