Home and Away Adventures in Beekeeping in the UK and Africa

About this book

During well over fifty years of beekeeping experience, John Home has twice served as Chairman of the UK Bee Farmers Association – one of only two members ever to be invited to serve a second term – and is also a former Chairman of the Warwickshire Beekeepers Association and its local Warwick & Leamington branch.

His award-winning Fosse Way Honey has been served at the Ritz and has also found its way onto the tables of several members of the Royal Family, while a Middle Eastern sheikh regularly sent a chauffeur-driven car from London to Warwickshire to pick up fresh supplies. As one of the country's most high-profile commercial beekeepers and a ceaseless campaigner and spokesman on behalf of the British beekeeping industry, John has come into contact over the years not only with royalty but also with government ministers and show business personalities.

Although he sold his hugely successful business in 2005 and went into semi-retirement, he remains an enthusiastic and highly active hobby beekeeper, devoting most of his time and energy to Bees Abroad, a charity organization that seeks to alleviate poverty in developing countries, mostly in Africa, by helping to introduce beekeeping as a simple and inexpensive way of providing nutrition and earning income for families in some of the world's poorest communities. Along with his wife Mary, he now makes regular trips to Kenya where, together, the two of them provide training and support for the many beekeeping groups they have set up in various, often very remote, areas.

In Home and Away he looks back over a lifetime of beekeeping, the many people he has met and worked with along the way and the sometimes rather alarming adventures that have befallen him in the faraway places where his Bees Abroad activities are keeping him busier than ever.

All profits from sales of Home and Away will be donated to Bees Abroad.

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