Bees at The Newt

Luxury hotels are getting in on the beekeeping trend and many have beehives on their rooftops, or in among heritage varieties in their kitchen gardens; honey features on their menus and guests get to peek under the hive roof.
But none, to our knowledge, has taken a commitment to honey bees as close to its heart as the five-star, country house hotel The Newt in Somerset. There are bees in trees, in cider orchards, in bee boles beside a pond and this summer they opened a glorious new attraction – the Beezantium – for guests to experience a bee’s-eye view of the world.
This jewel box of a building, designed by exhibition architects Kossmandejong from the Netherlands with input from the Newt’s head beekeeper Paula Carnell, is crafted out of wood, copper and glass and nestles in woodland surrounded by an apiary planted with native wildflowers.
The star attractions are the live bees. When I visited, two of the five different types of observation hive were occupied, allowing visitors not only to observe the colonies but breathe in the hive aromas and listen to a contented buzz.
Elsewhere, displays depict the lifecycle of honey bees, their impact on the planet and the history of bees and beekeeping. Interaction is through infographics, exhibits such as a herbarium with pressed flowers and pollen foraged by bees on the estate and samples of the resulting honeys, and an audio guide narrated by Paula.
A natural approach
Paula and her team of four part-time beekeepers eschew smokers for lavender-water sprays, weekly hive inspections for external observations, do not feed sugar, and use queen excluders for clearer boards.
“The passion behind these gardens is that they inspire people,” says Paula, “and that’s what I want to do with the bees. We are learning from the bees, sharing what we’re learning and keep on evolving to provide a paradise for the bees. I call it naturopathic beekeeping and it very much follows Tom Seeley’s Darwinian beekeeping. What’s great is that we’re really following what the bees’ want: what they thrive on and what they don’t thrive on.”
She describes her approach as bee-centred beekeeping: if the bees have the right conditions, including a suitable space for a nest, ample healthy forage and plenty of propolis, then the bees will prosper.
Asking the bees
At harvest time she has an unconventional approach to taking the crop and asks the bees how many frames they will allow her to remove.
“A hive could have four supers and we don’t just take a whole super. We might get a feeling we can take 10 or 15 or 20 frames. So what we do is, on the day we agreed with the bees, we go back to the hives, take off those supers, go through them frame by frame and the combs with no bees on are the ones we can take.
“What that means is that we get a mixture of honeys, so we’re not just getting one crop, and it also means the bees are left with a mixed larder and not just one floral source.”
Varroa control
The bees at The Newt exhibit hygienic behaviour and have a low varroa mite count; colonies are given bee gyms but not miticides and the team hopes that pseudoscorpions will, one day, move naturally onto the estate where they could act as varroa-control agents.
“We’re looking more holistically. Varroa is around and any swarm that comes into the estate could have come from a colony that has been chemically treated or has varroa, so we have to quarantine, look at them and think how we can best support those bees and protect the bees we already have.
“There’s no benefit in having a sick colony. It’s not what nature would do. We’re not propping up weak colonies and I think that’s been the hardest lesson, though we might try combining them.”
Swarming
In the season the team carry out some splits of bulging colonies but generally try to manage the bees’ instinct to reproduce through carefully sited bait hives.
Paula draws on the research of John Harding, author of An Holistic Way in Saving the Honeybee, who asserts that honey bees thrive at electrical frequency of around 250 hertz and actively look for it by swarming.
“Under the ground there is water flowing and that creates a geopathic curtain which is 230 to 260 hertz. Bees’ frequency is 256 hertz. So if you know where these geopathic curtains are, you know where the bees want to be. I dowsed the estate to find where those lines where and that’s where I put the bait hives.”
Many different types of hive
Throughout the 30 acres of gardens and 300 acres of woodland, cider orchards and farmland, there are many different types of hive including WBCs, Flow Hives, Golden Hives, skeps and Warre hives, with roughened internal walls painted with propolis and shungite, a mineral-like substance reputed to have healing properties.
“The bottom line is that there isn’t one fits-all hive and that is the key point,” explains Paula as she showed us around. “What we’ve noticed with the personalities of each colony is that some bees want to live together, some don’t, some want to be in a tower block, some want to be in a semi-detached and some want to be completely left on their own up a tree. And by the position of our apiaries and our hives, and by allowing wild mating and swarming, I feel that the bees could be in a WBC for a few years and then they think: do you know what, we’re going to go up into a freedom hive for a couple of years in a tree, and they can do that.”
Each colony is named, rather than the individual queens which are neither marked nor clipped; for example, in the Rookery apiary there are Freda, Druid and Deana colonies while Emily and Petra are in Gore orchard. In all, there are between 15 and 20 colonies.
Says Paula, “I am great fan of Matt Somerville and his Bee Kind hives and, because we have the bees in the trees, the plan was always that visitors would be able to see the bees from a safe distance. Matt’s Freedom hives sited high up in the trees were the perfect starting point.
“Then we got the Golden hives and to populate them we hung up bait hives. We have Matt’s smaller version of a Golden hive as a bait hive and, four and a half years in, I’d say the Golden hives are just the best hives. The colonies that have survived winters have thrived, they’re really strong, they produce a lot of propolis which I know not all beekeepers like, but we find it has so many benefits. We’ve even noticed in Matt’s hives that the bees make propolis curtains that cover the entrances which are opened and shut throughout the year. It is amazing!”
From farm to plate
The bees are an integral part of The Newt’s quest for sustainability; the working farm and orchard produces a very high percentage of what is sold and served across the site and, of course, the bees play their part in this bounty through their pollination services. The passion, craftsmanship and investment behind the hotel and garden have created a landscape which literally resonates with the humming of insects, birds and people.
A ‘natural’ approach
The beekeeping team prefer bee-centred hives such as the Warre, Freedom and Golden hives as they replicate what happens in nature; the bees are provided with simple top bars or have space to build wild comb rather than being encouraged to expand upwards on frames of foundation.
The Freedom hive is a 12-sided wooden cylinder which can be hoisted into trees or put on a tripod stand. There is an inspection board on the base and a thick cedar board on the top from which the bees build their comb downwards.
Golden hives are double-walled, insulated hives with integral legs and a removable base where bees can build deep comb without a queen excluder.
History
The Newt occupies Hadspen House, first built in 1687 and home for two centuries to the Hobhouse family, stands in a large working estate between Castle Cary and Bruton in Somerset.
Karen Roos, former editor of Elle Decoration, who also opened Babylonstoren in South Africa, was the designer. The house and estate with its deer park, working farm and extensive native woodland took six years to redevelop.
The meticulously designed gardens (originally by Penelope Hobhouse and Nori and Sandra Pope) have been entirely replanted and redesigned by Patrice Taravella. The centrepiece is an egg-shaped parabola walled garden planted with 460 espaliered British apple trees, with 267 pre-1930s eating varieties interspersed with crab apples to increase the length of the pollinating season, arranged in a Baroque-style maze.
The estate has a cider press, bottling plant and bar, mushroom house, History of Gardening Museum, farm shop, treetop walk and a colony of great crested newts (after which the hotel is named).
The Newt is the sister hotel of Babylonstoren, a preserved Cape Dutch farm estate in the Drakenstein Valley between Franschhoek and Paarl in South Africa.
Visitor information
To visit the Beezantium or to go on a Bee Safari, you must be a member of The Newt to access the gardens. Membership costs £48 per year and is free for children under 16. Entrance is free to hotel guests. thenewtinsomerset.com/

Photo: Courtesy of Richard Rickitt, BeeCraft

NB This article appeared in BeeCraft November 2021