Pure Buzzin’, Meadow Well, North Tyneside
A sweeter kind of honey
A love of nature doesn’t need access to vast swathes of open countryside. Sometimes, a small plot of land next to a railway line is enough.
For Stephen Douglas, more often known as Duggy, Pure Buzzin’ is the result of a lifelong love of the natural world. That grew into a passion for bees – and a determination to use that to strengthen the North Tyneside community.
“I’ve always been a bit of a geek for nature,” Duggy said. “When I was a kid, I used to sit outside in the street watching the ants come and go, squashing bugs and putting them next to the ant nests to see what would happen. I was fascinated.”
Later that inspired Duggy and an old school friend, James Imhoof, to get their first hives. Four years into that beekeeping journey, the fascination endures. On a sunny autumn morning, as the bees make their final preparations for winter, it’s a good time to reflect on the end of another year in the life of the hives.
“This is my favourite thing,” Duggy added. “It’s all very well opening up the hive and looking at the frame, that’s fascinating. But I can spend a full day just standing here – or if I’m feeling really brave, I’ll get a seat actually in the apiary – and watch the bees coming and going. It’s absolutely fascinating.
“It looks like chaos at first but there’s some real order. You’ve got the bouncer bees defending the hive, making sure that bees coming in belong there, you’ve got the foragers going out. There’s so much communication going on inside that hive.”
‘You could see the delight on their faces’
Just as the bees work as a community, Pure Buzzin’ wants to build communities around the apiary. North Tyneside, like many parts of the region, struggles with high levels of deprivation. Beekeeping can, for some, be an unexpected source of help and support.
“The whole point of doing this community work is to try to provide better life services to local people,” Duggy said. “For example, we work with nearby high schools, with children who are part of alternative education programmes. For whatever reason, they might struggle to sit in a typical classroom and access their education, so they come here for six weeks. We give them a different way to engage, we build hives together, paint them together, we learn about the bees.
“But all the way through, the aim is to build resilience and give these youngsters a bit of a boost to their self-esteem.
“It’s lovely that beekeeping can teach people things in lots of different areas. It’s not just bees. When you put the hives together, there are woodwork skills, which then almost demands communication with your peers and gets you included into a group.”
A community focus leads to connections with other, like-minded projects: in the Meadow Well community garden, there’s a mural by Durham Spray Paints, featured by Talking Northeast in September. The organisations have plenty in common, not least a determination to involve as many people as possible.
“Pure Buzzin’ is all about promoting inclusion. It’s something I’ve come to be really passionate about through my life, working with a lot of people with disabilities. I really want to reduce social isolation. There are too many people who are sat by themselves because they don’t have any local links. I want to provide a platform to help people find those local links.
“Hopefully I can do that, increase mental health and wellbeing, through this beautiful craft of beekeeping.”
There’s a sense of purpose and achievement that certainly promotes wellbeing.
“This morning we were spinning the honey from our hives, and you could see the delight on the adult’s faces,” Duggy said. “It’s the first time we’ve done that. I purposefully made them wait to get the honey. I didn’t start beekeeping to get loads of honey, I think that’s a bit of a poor angle to come from, even though it’s a brilliant by-product.
“But we started the group by getting an understanding of the colony, learning from the bees, then getting the honey from them. That’s a great sense of achievement, it’s why we all like learning new things.”
Facing down fakes
Think counterfeit, and honey isn’t likely to be the first product that springs to mind. Yet stats suggest it is among the most frequently faked products in the world. There is a huge difference between mass-produced honey – ‘snidey’, as Duggy calls it – and the real thing.
That difference is a bit like the contrast between a home-cooked dinner and a microwave meal. It lies in the complexity of the flavour and the effort that goes into creating it.
“When you put a spoonful of honey in your mouth, you’ll get that sweet taste, you recognise that honey taste,” Duggy said. “But with a lot of what’s on the market, you’re getting one flavour. It stays the same, it’s sweet, we know it’s honey but it’s not the same.
“Take some honey straight from a hive that hasn’t been watered down with sugar and whatnot, put a spoonful of that in your mouth and you’ve still got that first taste. But then the flavours start to evolve, it’s a really complex flavour. You’ve got an aftertaste.
“A lot of the honey that you find on the shelves, if you take that and put it under a microscope you won’t see a trace of pollen there,” he said. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s never been near a beehive. It’s synthetic, or it’s just sugar syrup with food colouring and maybe some flavourings to replicate honey.
“But it’s so hard for a consumer to know what’s authentic and what’s a rip-off.”
Bad honey is also bad for the bees. Some beekeepers tend to take away all the honey that their hives produce, replacing it with a sugar syrup to keep the colony alive over the winter. It works, but at a cost.
“We need to remember that honey is full of amino acids and minerals,” Duggy explained. “It’s a really complex substance, nutritionally there’s so much going on. You don’t get that from sugar syrup.
“Bees will survive on sugar syrup over the winter, but I don’t think they’ll thrive. It’s a bit like feeding them junk food all the time.
“I’ve not fed any of my bees on sugar this year, and some of my hives have not had sugar for four years. I don’t want the honey that we spin off these hives being tainted with sugar. Sugar’s not good for us.”
Genuine honey, as well as bookings for beekeeping experiences, are available on the Pure Buzzin’ site.
Learning to live together
Duggy has 53 hives around the region, and more than a dozen at the Meadow Well site. With up to 60,000 bees per hive, it amounts to a big buzz. Yet the surrounding gardens are strangely quiet.
That’s actually a good thing. Incredibly, honeybees can forage up to five miles in search of nectar. They tend not to stay too close to home for fear of predators following them back to the hive. It also means there’s greater diversity in the immediate surroundings. The honeybees do not drive out other pollinators and butterflies, dragonflies and bumble bees continue to thrive in the community garden.
More of a surprise, the hives can also co-exist with a wasps’ nest on the doorstep.
“In the past, I would have tried to destroy that nest, because wasps prey on beehives,” Duggy said. “I’ve seen hives where wasps have stripped out all the honey, killed all the bees.
“But I’ve changed my mind. Wasps are also important to our ecosystem, they have a role in pollination, in reducing pests in the gardens. We’ve got a lot of veg growing here, so I wanted to leave them to it.”
Instead of killing the wasps, closing some of the hive entrances and ensuring there is strength in numbers in each hive means the bees can defend their territory and the wasps can go about their business.
“People dislike wasps for obvious reasons, but when you look at it, when they go around stinging people and getting a bit radgey, it’s just part of their little cycle,” Duggy added. “At this time of year, they are literally dying of starvation and there’s no queen to guide them. But I haven’t seen them destroy any hives because of the steps I’ve taken.
“They are off foraging and getting on with their lives side by side.”
‘They aren’t as radgey as you think’
That change of heart regarding wasps is just part of the on-going learning process around the hives. As Duggy points out, the beauty of Pure Buzzin’ is that groups learn together, rather than one leader coming along with all the answers.
And that’s a journey that others can follow relatively easily. The British Beekeeping Association has a wealth of local branches – Duggy is part of the Newcastle district association – which try to support new beekeepers. Topped up with online resources and the invaluable Haynes Manual for Beekeeping, there’s a wealth of resources for potential beekeepers.
At the same time, it can be a little daunting to sift through all that advice.
“In beekeeping there are lots of ways to manage a hive and look after those bees, make sure they are healthy and strong,” Duggy said. “There’s a lot of conflicting advice and some keepers are adamant that their way is the best way. People are passionate, they get very emotional about it.
“That’s why it’s good to link up with an association when you start out, find a mentor and get some experience of hives.
“I run beekeeping experiences through Pure Buzzin’, you can come down to the apiary, open some hives, see how you feel around honeybees. Information is always coming up on my website and social media about bees and beekeeping. But for a new beekeeper the best resource is to get in touch with the local association, that’s what they’re there for.”
Even bee-sceptics are quickly converted by the experience.
“There’s nearly always one person who didn’t really sign up for this, they only came because they felt they had to,” Duggy smiles. “You can spot them in the corner, hands by their sides, trying to stay as still as they can.
“But after five minutes or so, they’ve got their heads in the middle of a hive with the rest of us, the interest just takes over. Once you lift that lid off, you see the bees aren’t as radgey as you think, they don’t try to sting you. It’s the first big step.”
