Job Opportunities

We are recruiting for a beekeeper who will play a significant part in our queen rearing operation for the 2025 season. This role will be from April 2025 through to the end of September 2025. Although this role is ‘seasonal’, this role could become full time permanent if desired with opportunity to work in other areas of the business in the beekeeping ‘off season’ as we are busy throughout the year.

We are open to both domestic and international applications. If applying from an international location you will need the right to work in the UK, we can discuss this with applicants on an individual basis.

Background

At Northumberland Honey Co we currently manage 800 mating nuclei for open mating of queens, on a 4 week cycle. With between 100-200 nuclei for instrumentally inseminated queens and nucleus colonies for sale.

Our queen rearing apiary runs a starter / finisher system with upto 16 finishers at any one time. We incubate queen cells in our queen lab where we also undertake grafting and instrumental insemination. We currently instrumentally inseminate around 200 queens a season and aim to produce 2,000 open mated queens, with the plan to increase this number.

Job Plan / Responsibilities / Key Abilities

• Stocking mating nucs (apidea type)
• Tidying queen bee lab and workshop keeping organised
• Transferring queen cells from incubator out into mating nucs
• Assisting with managing queen rearing apiary, setting up starters, finishers and managing nuclei
• Pulling / caging mated and virgin queens
• Checking emergence rates from cells
• Assisting with managing drone rearer colonies
• Banking virgin queens
• Gathering drones for instrumental insemination
• Maintaining records on % successes and failures.
• Reporting back on field status
• Working as part of a close team and also individually
• Ensuring colonies are in good health and feed status
• Excellent queen handling abilities and cell handling
• Being able to mark and clip queens

As part of the working week we have a structured job plan, based around a queen whiteboard with a date / timetable of events flowing from one task to the other, from grafting date, tracking all the way through to queen mating check dates and caging dates.

With queen rearing, set tasks occur on a set day during the week, we have these jobs clearly mapped out with no guessing or uncertainty about what the next task is. One benefit of working in a structured queen rearing unit, the confidence of organisation and no uncertainty on what the day will bring, but there is always enough variation in the day to keep the job exciting.

As a whole team at Northumberland Honey Co we have weekly staff briefings on a Monday morning where the whole team is present to discuss the work of the week ahead, along with staff socials.

The queen rearing work starts in April and runs through to end of August. This job role is a seasonal role starting Mid April and completing end of September.

Working Hours

Working hours are planned to be Monday to Friday 9am to 5pm. As our business and staff members are family focussed we avoid where possible working evenings and weekends. Although with beekeeping / weather patterns there may be the rare occasion where some weekend work is required. We aim to graft queens on days to avoid significant weekend workload as we appreciate a work life balance even in the height of the season is needed.

Annual Leave

Annual Leave is 6 weeks pro rata, and it is expected with the nature of the job that the majority of annual leave will be taken at the end of the seasonal work load during the month of September.

Salary

Salary dependent on experience and is competitive within the industry to be discussed.

Training

Training will be provided, all new starters have a structured induction/ training programme, however it is expected that you will already have beekeeping experience. If you don’t have all the beekeeping experience we require, but have transferable skills / other beekeeping experience please do still apply or discuss with us further.

For experienced beekeepers there may be scope to undertake training whilst with us in instrumental insemination if desired.

Accomodation

We are now in a position to be able to offer accomodation within 20 minutes of Haltwhistle, with costs of services/ rent to be negotiated as part of the job offer for the successful candidate. 

Closing Date

We have not set a closing date for applications as this is a fairly niche role and applicants we expect will be less than our usual job roles we offer. We do however expect to have the position filled for the start of 2025. So if you are interested please do apply as soon as possible.

All applications are treated with the utmost confidence and references/ previous employers only contacted after a provisional job offer is made and accepted.

How to Apply

Please complete the application form below, or for an informal chat call Luke on 07752 534953