Polish hospital worker turns her hand to making Yorkshire honey with great results

Around half a million bees were stolen in five hives last year from Tresillian House in Cornwall, with officials believing the culprit may have been another beekeeper. In a twist to that tale, the bees are said to have begun returning to the estate. Agata has suffered no such apiary outrage but knows these things happen.

We drive down the main road, turn on to a smaller road, then bump along a track besides a field. Agata, a Polish woman making life sweeter in Yorkshire, keeps bees all around York. “The farmers are happy because the bees pollinate crops,” she says.

The hives here are cube-shaped blocks. Agata changes into her beekeeping suit, and hands me one. She lights her smoker can, then puffs smoke into one of the hives as it’s still cold for bees. Lifting the lid, she says the bees are docile.

Hidden inside my borrowed beekeepers’ suit – “do make sure everything is fastened because they always find a way in” – I wonder what a less chilled hive might look like.

The answer comes when Agata returns the frame with its bees and the beginnings of honeycomb, replaces the lid on the contented bees, and moves to the next hive.

These bees buzz around like angry little politicians looking for someone to sting. Not happy bees at all.

Some bump into the netting covering my face. This seems mildly menacing, but Agata is unworried, being happy in the countryside with bees – even cross ones.

She is looking for evidence of eggs laid by the queen bee but can’t find any. These bees are angry because they are motherless and hungry.

“It’s the most important time,” she says. “We need to make sure the bees are happy. They will make a queen bee, or I will have to buy one.”

Agata has many hives in assorted locations, and they all need checking and tending to. It sounds like a lot of work. “Yes, it is – and that’s what I think if people complain about the price.”

Back at her car, we change out of the beekeepers’ suits, one of us with ease, the other like a clod-hopping bumbler who can’t tell one leg from the other.

“Try taking your shoe off,” Agata suggests. That helps and after that we drive back to Starbucks, a mundane setting after those fields and hives, and Agata tells the story of her and the bees.

“I always liked honey,” she says. “I always remember there was a honey jar in our house. It was the real honey and we always liked to get honey from local suppliers.

“And in those days when I was small, people made real honey. And that’s how it started. It was always on my mind that I wanted to have my own honey.”

Agata, 39, grew up in south-west Poland, and spent much time in the countryside.

“I was always surrounded by beautiful mother nature. And my father was the local fisherman, and he took us with him. We played outside, the lake, mountains.

“That’s how I grew up and I was a Scout as well, so I was into adventure when I was small, and that feeling brought me here, I think.”

She was a nurse in Poland, moved first to London, then to Yorkshire five years ago, and lives in Wilberfoss with her two children. Aside from keeping bees, she works at York Hospital two days a week, assessing patients before operations, taking bloods and so forth.

“I have the most beautiful team, the loveliest doctors and nurses. I am really happy and that’s why I don’t want to leave my job.”

The rest of her week is divided between bees and family life. York Bee sells six types of honey, honeycombs and hand-rolled beeswax candles. Agata produced her first jar of honey three years ago, and now sells her honey throughout Yorkshire.

It’s a one-woman business, although she says she couldn’t manage without the help of many people, including friends, fellow beekeepers and Abelo, the local beekeeping supplier.

When she moved to Wilberfoss, her neighbour was a beekeeper with 30 years’ experience. “She gave me her first old hive and I painted it,” Agata says.

Sitting in the noisy clatter of Starbucks, a distance from those hives and even further from Poland, a question arises: what would that little girl think if she could look ahead and see you now, running a honey business in Yorkshire?

“Oh my God! In a different country making honey. I’ve got chilly everywhere,” she says, charmingly. “Chilly everywhere. I wouldn’t believe that, that I would open such a thing. I wouldn’t do that without people. The people are my passion to be honest.”

Agata’s aim is both simple and grand. “My idea is to be the most honest person of the honey you ever met.

“If people know about the honey, they will see this is real honey, and I want to educate people how to know the difference between the fake honey and the real honey.”

York Bee honey is raw and unpasturised, unlike much supermarket honey. “They heat it, they kill everything. They mix imported honey from different countries, so many lies. My honey is just pure, and that’s it. Anybody can check that.”

Is raw honey good for you? Well, it’s good on my breakfast toast, but Agata insists it doesn’t stop there.

“So many benefits, honestly, so many benefits. Antibacterial, and heather honey is so powerful, it’s like Manuka honey. People are paying fortunes for Manuka honey, but heather honey has the same bacteria which helps build your immune system.”

She has learned to respect bees. “They teach me a lot. This is like teamwork; this is teamwork with them. I don’t know, there is something about the bees, they teach me so much. How to respect mother nature. They teach so much.”

Although most of her honey is from Yorkshire bees, the heather honey that Agata produces comes from Scotland. She drives up once a year to gather the honey at the end of July or beginning of August. It’s a darker honey.

“We’ve got beautiful heather honey from our country – we should eat that,” she says. “And the most important thing is to eat local honey and not honey from other countries.”

Agata loves living in Yorkshire and finds everyone so helpful and kind. She is a busy bee but a contented one.

“When you’ve got your passion and you put it into you work, it never stops. I like to be busy so I’m not complaining. And I’ve got such great feedback on how my honey has helped people.”

yorkbee.co.uk