Growing Our Hive - How We’re Doubling Our Beekeeping Operation Every Year

If you’ve ever tended a garden, you’ll know there’s a rhythm to growth. You plant the seeds, water them, protect them and watch them slowly flourish. And if you do it right, the next year you can plant even more.

At Macmandu Honey, our beekeeping journey has been much the same. We started with just a handful of hives. Today, we have multiple apiary sites and are on track to double our hives for the second year in a row. And yet, even as we grow, we’re careful to nurture the heart of what makes our honey special: healthy bees, ethical practices and exceptional quality.

This is the story of how and why we’re growing our hive, one season at a time.

It All Started Small

Our beekeeping journey began humbly with a single captured swarm and an empty hive box (and if you’ve read our storm night story, a bucket in the rain). We didn’t begin with visions of a commercial empire. We simply loved bees, respected their work and wanted to keep them well.

But as the seasons passed, something happened: our hives thrived. With healthy queens, abundant forage and good management, each colony grew strong. And strong colonies have a way of multiplying by swarming naturally or by us splitting them into new hives at the right time. Before long, we had more bees than we’d started with.

We could have stopped there, content with a small sideline. But we saw an opportunity: to share more of our pure, local honey with our community and to be part of the bigger picture of supporting pollinator health in our region. To do that, we’d need more hives.

Why Growth Needs to Be Gradual

It’s tempting to grow fast to buy in dozens of hives or import bees to ramp up production overnight. But that’s not how we work at Macmandu. We believe growth should match capacity.

Why? Because beekeeping isn’t just about the number of hives. Every colony requires regular checks, feeding in lean seasons, pest and disease management, and careful harvesting. If you grow too quickly without the infrastructure, time, or resources to manage it, the bees suffer and so does the quality of the honey.

Instead, we’ve chosen a steady, doubling pace. This gives us time to train more hands, invest in better equipment and most importantly ensure that every hive is as well cared for as the first one we ever kept.

How We’re Doubling Responsibly

1. Splitting Strong Colonies

One of the most sustainable ways to grow your apiary is to make new colonies from your strongest existing hives. In spring, when a hive is bursting with bees and brood, we can take a portion of its frames along with some bees and food stores and place them in a new hive box with a new or mated queen. This mimics the bees’ natural swarming instinct, but in a controlled way. It reduces the risk of losing half the colony to an actual swarm and it gives us a healthy new hive.

2. Selecting Quality Queens

The queen bee sets the tone for the entire colony. A good queen means strong, gentle, productive bees. We’re careful about where we source our queens often raising them from our own best colonies so that desirable traits are passed on. We don’t just want more hives; we want better hives.

3. Expanding Apiary Sites

As we add hives, we need to ensure there’s enough forage for them all. That means securing new apiary sites with diverse, pesticide-free forage. We choose locations where bees can find nectar and pollen from early spring to late autumn, and we work with landowners who understand and value what bees bring to their land.

4. Matching Growth with Equipment and Labor

More hives mean more boxes, frames, extractors, storage and jars and more time in the bee suit. We’ve invested in equipment that allows us to handle the increased workload efficiently without rushing the bees or cutting corners. We’ve also involved our family and community in the process, sometimes bringing in extra help during peak seasons.

The Business Side of Bees

Doubling our hives each year also means doubling our potential honey harvest. But here’s where our business philosophy comes in: we market to match our output, not the other way around.

Some brands focus heavily on marketing, creating high demand before they can supply it. That can lead to cutting quality to meet orders. We prefer the opposite building capacity first, then increasing sales. It keeps our promises real and our reputation intact.

Our expansion also allows us to consider new opportunities, like supplying boutique retailers, partnering with local cafes, or offering limited seasonal batches (such as spring wildflower honey or darker autumn honey). But we never promise what we can’t deliver.

Why Growth Matters Beyond Honey

For us, growing our hive is about more than selling more jars of honey. It’s about amplifying the good that bees do.

More hives mean more pollination for local crops and wild plants. Farmers benefit, ecosystems benefit and biodiversity increases. It’s a quiet kind of ripple effect, but one that matters deeply especially in a time when pollinator populations face so many threats.

We’ve also seen how our growing operation sparks curiosity and connection. When people visit our apiaries or taste our honey, they often start asking questions about bees, pollination and how they can help. In this way, our growth helps grow awareness too.

Industry Insights: Scaling With Integrity

For our fellow beekeepers, here’s what we’ve learned about scaling up:

• Plan for the forage base before adding hives. Overcrowding an area can lead to poor honey yields and stressed bees.

• Maintain health protocols. More hives mean more chances for disease to spread if you’re not vigilant.

• Invest in workflow efficiency. From hive stands to extracting equipment, small improvements save big time when multiplied across many hives.

• Keep marketing realistic. Growing your customer base slowly and in step with production avoids disappointment and preserves trust.

In short: doubling hives successfully isn’t just about multiplying boxes it’s about multiplying capacity, care and quality in equal measure.

Looking Ahead

As we look to the next year, we’re excited to double again. We already have plans for where the new hives will go, which queens we’ll raise and how we’ll ensure there’s forage for every bee. It’s a lot of work, yes but it’s work we love.

We imagine a future where Macmandu Honey is known not just for the purity of our product, but for the way we’ve grown: steadily, ethically and always with the bees’ welfare first. If that means we take a little longer to get to “big player” status, so be it. The journey is just as important as the destination.

A Final Word on Growth

People sometimes ask, “Aren’t you worried about growing too slowly?”

The truth is, in beekeeping, slow and steady is the fast way. Because when you grow at the pace nature allows, you don’t have to backtrack to fix mistakes or replace losses. You build something strong from the ground up or in our case, from the hive up.

When you open a jar of our honey, you’re not just tasting the work of the bees in that season. You’re tasting the result of years of careful stewardship, planning, and growth. That’s what doubling our hives really means: doubling our ability to keep promises, protect pollinators and share the purest honey we know how to make.

So as we zip up our bee suits and step into another season of expansion, we carry with us the same care we had for that very first hive. Because no matter how many colonies we manage, every single one matters.

And if we do it right, every spoonful of Macmandu honey will always taste like the best part of growth: sweet, steady, and full of promise.