How we write the guides
The 45 guides in the library carry legal duties, medicine records and bee health, so it is fair to ask who wrote them and where the numbers came from. This page answers both, and says what happens when we get something wrong.
Who writes them
Bees Knees Apiary is built and run by a beekeeper in the UK, and the guides are written by the same person. That is the honest position: they are written by a hobby beekeeper for hobby beekeepers, not by a bee inspector and not by a vet.
Which is exactly why nothing here rests on our own say-so. Where a guide states a figure, a date, a temperature or a legal duty, it comes from a published document and that document is named at the foot of the page with a link to it. Where we are describing what we do in our own apiary, the guide says so plainly and marks it as ours.
Where the figures come from
Across the library there are 225 citations pointing at 110 separate documents. The great majority are official:
- The National Bee Unit, cited 111 times. Its fact sheets and best-practice guidelines are the backbone of nearly every guide.
- GOV.UK and UK legislation, cited 34 times, for anything that is a legal duty rather than good practice.
- Peer-reviewed research, cited 24 times, where a question is genuinely settled by evidence rather than custom.
- Beekeeping associations, including the Welsh, Scottish and British beekeeping associations, for practical technique.
- Manufacturers, only for their own products, because nobody else can tell you the authorised dose of a treatment.
How a source is chosen, and checked
The rule is simple and it is the one most easily broken: if we could not open it, we do not cite it. Every source has been read, not searched for and assumed. Each entry records what that document actually supports in our guide, written from the document rather than from memory.
That rule exists because we broke it. An earlier version of the library contained three sources that did not exist and two incorrect DOIs, produced with complete confidence. They were found, corrected, and the library now has an automated check that fails the build if a cited paper title does not match the real one at its DOI.
A second check runs on every release. It fails the build if a guide cites a source that is not listed, lists a source it never cites, or drifts from the house rules on plain language. Being unable to ship is a better guardrail than good intentions.
Where guidance is contested, we say so
Beekeeping is full of questions where experienced people disagree, and a few where the official guidance disagrees with itself. When that happens the guide sets out both positions and tells you which we follow and why, rather than picking one and presenting it as settled.
A worked example. On freezing frames against wax moth, the National Bee Unit鈥檚 wax moth fact sheet says 24 hours and its leaflet on pests of adult bees says 48. Our guides give both figures, name which document each came from, and recommend 48 as the working minimum. Neither document states a temperature, and we say that too, because it is the gap that actually matters.
Crown copyright and quoting
National Bee Unit and GOV.UK material is Crown copyright, reusable under the Open Government Licence v3.0 with attribution, and every guide carries that attribution. We restate facts in our own words, quote only short phrases where the exact wording matters, and never reproduce a diagram, a table or a photograph.
How often it is reviewed
Every guide shows the date it was last updated. Guides touching the law or medicines are checked when the underlying guidance changes, which in practice means whenever the National Bee Unit reissues a fact sheet or GOV.UK amends its advice. Documents get quietly rewritten under the same web address more often than you would expect, so a link that still works is not proof that what it says has not moved.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, we would genuinely rather know. Tell us what the guide says, what you believe is correct, and ideally where that comes from.
Substantive corrections are made to the guide and its updated date moves. We do not quietly edit a figure and pretend it always said that.
What this is not
None of it is legal advice or veterinary advice. Rules change, and the guides say throughout that you should check current guidance on GOV.UK before relying on it. If a colony is sick, your bee inspector is free and knows more than any website.