Honey
4U

Since 2017,  Honey 4U has done more than refine an old tradition: We've started a new one. Guided by international trends; we combine unique beekeeping techniques from around the world to help our bees create a natural honey full of flavour and rich in colour.

Honey 4U makes everything in small batches from our home in QLD. This ensures our honey has the perfect blend of flavours from all our hives. Small batches help us to improve our other products as well; we provide smooth clean beeswax as well as vibrant and flavourful pollen.

Here at Honey 4U we believe that the best honey comes from the best kept bees, so whether you are buying a new queen or a whole swarm you can rest assured we have given your bees the best possible care. 

Our Bees
 

Here at Honey 4U we breed our own queens; we breed a combination of purebred Italian and wild Australian bees to create a strain unique to us, our bees handle the Australian heat very well and the Italian queens ability to calm an angry swarm has been passed down to our strain. 

Our bees are large and yellow in colour with thin stripes.  They produce a large amount of honey and have a placid nature. This makes them ideal for both commercial and hobbyist use.  

New Easy Frame
Compatible Long Hive

— Original Design by Honey 4U -

Bee Hives:
The Future
 

At Honey 4U our mantra is work smarter not harder, it was in service of this core principle that we developed the frame compatible long hive. 

These hives are designed to minimise the amount of labour involved in beekeeping. An average hive box weighs 60Kg and in a typical beehive at least one of these boxes will need to be lifted off the hive and put aside to perform an inspection of the brood and honey. 

In effect the long hive takes three bee boxes and puts them side by side. This gives your bees as much space as they will need to become a highly productive swarm while also entirely eliminating the need to lift a 60Kg box. 

The long hives also allow for more precise supering to optimise your bees productivity; because the queen excluder is inserted like a typical frame you can place it anywhere in the box. This means that as your hive grows you can move your queen excluder to expand the hive one frame at a time rather than 10 at a time. This helps ensure the bees build neat comb that is easy to work with, as opposed to a typical setup that allows them to jigsaw and build messy unusable combs. 

Another key benefit to our long box is it is capable of operating in a dual queen setup. When set up in this configuration you open the doors at opposite ends of the hive and place two queen excluders one at each end with the super in the middle. This setup lets you build up the hive rapidly, Having  two queens in the long box also means that, once established, should you accidentally kill one of the queens you are never at risk of losing your swarm. Simply rearrange your box back into a single queen configuration and the hive will continue as normal.

Additionally if you are running a commercial operation you can keep your newly fertilised queens in strong hives until your customers are ready for them. This will insure they are well fed and looked after and is far safer than placing new queens into nucleus boxes. 

The list of benefits to this design go on an on, The design stays cooler in the Australian heat, the roof is stronger and more water resistant and lets not forget that in addition to all this our custom built and designed long hives are entirely compatible with both standard and frames. This means no more messy uncapping and spinning as the easy hive minimises honey loss and maximises your return by ensuring optimum ease of use and productivity.

We sell both pre built long boxes and kits; we also sell an informational packet that comes with an architectural drawing of the long box and instructions on how to assemble one for your self should you prefer the do it yourself method.      

Busy Bee Africa

— Free Training and advice for beekeepers in the developing world -

Free Training
And Advice

Busy Bee Africa is the name of our latest project, We are trying to provide training and advice to people in need.  Beekeeping, as you know, can "bee" a tricky business but, with the correct approach it can also be a good stable source of income. Through Busy Bee we want to give people a path out of poverty. 

As part of the program we provide training on: hive construction (we teach the construction of both standard and the alternative cheaper to produce bar hives; wild bee capture; hive maintenance; bee care; queen managment and how to be safe around your bees.

Honey 4U is a family run company and we are a family of migrants. Originally we were from Zimbabwe, Things are not great there right now and this project lets us help those who could not or would not leave their homes and now face the daily struggles of a life that we can scarcely imagine.

Right now our program is helping one beekeeper in Zimbabwe, but we hope to expand it in the near future.

At Honey 4U we also provide workshops to Australian beekeepers. Unfortunately these programs are not free; we offer workshops on: bee care; hive maintenance; breeding; hive construction; the dual queen method; wild swarm collection, vacuum assisted hive cleaning and much more.
For those of you just starting out, never fear, most of our starter kits come with a free workshop on caring for your new hive. 

New Bee Guide
Hive Beetle Traps

— Original Design by Honey 4U -

No More
Hive Beetles
 

If you have been keeping up with our beekeepers journal you will know that when we first got our bees they were infested with hive beetles. We tried many of the traps on the market and they caught a few beetles, but it was too slow and our new hives were looking like they might not make it.

This prompted us to create a new type of beetle trap one that worked with the bees to defend the hive from invaders. Bees naturally congregate around the entrance to their hive in an attempt to control passage into the hive. Our design helps this instinctive defence of the hive by extending the entry into the hive past where they stop in a standard box. This creates a physical wall of bees that a beetle has to walk past to get into the hive. Additionally a metal grate is built into the baseboard of the hive, which the bees can walk over without issue, but  the smaller beetle will fall through with the gentlest nudge from the bees. Below the grate is a slotted groove into which you can slide a custom tray,  The smooth sides of the container stop the beetles escape, but we also recommend putting Diatomaceous Earth ( DE ) in the container to kill the beetle thus ensuring that it cannot escape. When you check the traps you can inspect, service and clean without disruption of the hive. 

Having DE in the Trap container will not harm the bees as they cannot get down into the container thanks to the custom built  grid size we are using. 

All of our base boards come with Beetle Traps pre Installed (you can specifically request plain baseboards, but we do not recommend this). We also sell an information package that comes with architectural drawings of the traps with instruction on how to build your own should you prefer the do it yourself method. 

We are currently working on a new design for the Beetle Traps and have temporarily stopped producing the above traps. Watch this space for pictures and news.   

New Custom Bee Feed

— Authorised Suppliers -

Balanced
Bee Nutrition
 

In the above video you can see the bee feeder 1 hour after the feed was placed into it. Clearly the bees know what is good for them. 

About

Custom Bee Feed is made in Australia by Australian beekeepers for an Australian climate. They have tailored Custom Bee Feed to ensure the bees are getting the best possible nutrition. The Feed consists of a unique balance of vitamins, minerals and amino acids that are designed to promote a healthy hive which will thrive even in the harshest of conditions.

Originally developed as a full pollen replacement, the developers discovered that it works exceptionally well as a supplement to natural pollen. This is because nearly all of Australia’s pollen producing flora are deficient in some form of nutrition and do not meet a bees basic nutritional requirements. Supplementary feeding allows bees to make the most of natural pollen when it is available, and maintain strong brood nests when there is no natural pollen available. The feed's balance of crude protein, vitamins, minerals and amino acids has delivered us far superior results to feeding straight pollen…

…But do not take our word for it - try it for yourself!

What’s in it?

Below is a list of the vitamins, minerals and amino acids that are used in Custom Bee Feed. We maintain a crude protein percentage of 37%. Natural Pollen is used as an attractant so the bees are drawn to it. 

Vitamins

Vitamin A, Vitamin B1, Vitamin B2, Vitamin B3, Vitamin B5, Vitamin B6, Vitamin B9, VItamin B12, Vitamin D, Vitamin D3, Vitamin E, Vitamin K, Biotin, Yeast Culture.

Minerals

Zinc, Copper, Selenium, Iodine, Manganese, Iron Chromium, Cobalt, Calcium, Phosphorus.

Amino Acids:

Isoleucine, Methionine, Leucine, Phenylalanine, Valine, Tryptophan, Lysine, Threonine, Histidine, Arginine.

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Hive Rental

— Adopt a Swarm -

Hive
Rental
 

Australia does not yet have a countrywide survey of the state of our bee colonies, but world wide bees are under threat of extinction and that is a serious problem for all of us.

Bees provide pollination for about one third of the plants people eat. We could see the end of stone fruits, melons, peppers, grains and "most importantly" chocolate if something is not done to save the world's bees.

This is where you come in; Honey 4U want to help you help the bees. We offer fully serviced beehives that you can keep in your back garden.

You gain some new fluffy friends and Australia's bee population gets a little more habitat.

Honey bees can fly up to 6 Km in search of food so even if you do not have a great many flowers in your garden you do not need to worry as  your new bees will still have plenty of food.

Not only will you be helping the bees, but you would also be doing a service to your community. Anyone who has a backyard veggie patch will be glad to have your bees buzzing around and our native flora can always use more pollinators.

Oh and let’s not forget the honey!  In addition to helping the environment you will also be receiving a tasty thank you gift from your fluffy friends.  

For more details on hive rental check our store page. 

Swarm Relocation

— Bee Removal -

Bee
Rescue
 

Every year wild bees swarm and sometimes they swarm into places where people are living. These bees often get killed by homeowners who are less than eager to share their home with a bunch of bees.
Here at honey 4U we offer a different solution, rather than paying for an exterminator to kill a valuable part of our ecosystem we can capture the wayward swarm.

We use an innovative vacuum capture device and a thermal imaging camera to find and remove the troublesome hive. We then take the bees to a quarantine location to check them for disease before replacing the queen with one of our own and settling them in with our other hives.

Thanks to our thermal imaging technology and the high body temperature of the bees we can locate swarms through walls and under floorboards. This lets us remove the entire swarm and all the brood, which lowers the risk of re-infestation and also ensures we remove all the brood which, if left behind, would start to smell and attract pests.