One bee. One twelfth of a teaspoon.

The building, from the public record

St John the Baptist was built in 1856 to the designs of James Deason, in ragstone and in the manner of the fifteenth century, with a battlemented north west tower. The land and £2,000 came from the Duke of Northumberland, and John Farnell of the Isleworth Brewery paid for the parsonage, a school and twelve almshouses on top of it. It is Grade II listed, and it keeps a complete set of stained glass attributed to William Wailes, which is a rare thing to survive intact.

It is a working parish church, not a visitor attraction, and nothing to do with me beyond the ground my hives sit on. If you want to see inside, go to a service.

There is a second reason for the name, and it is not just symbolism. The bees kept here are Buckfast bees, a strain bred inside a working Benedictine monastery. Buckfast Abbey, in the Dart Valley in Devon, is where a single monk spent seventy years perfecting them.

In 1906 a disease swept through Britain\'s honeybees and killed around ninety per cent of them. At Buckfast, a young Bavarian monk called Brother Adam, put in charge of the abbey bees at seventeen, watched most of his colonies die. The survivors were a few hives of Italian stock that resisted the disease, and from them he set out to breed a bee that combined Italian resilience with the native bee\'s hardiness. He travelled Europe, the Middle East and Africa gathering the best genetics he could find, and selected only for gentleness, health and honey. He worked at it until the 1990s and died in 1996, aged 98.

So these bees were, quite literally, conceived and perfected in a monastery through a life of quiet devotion. That is why, to the people who keep them, they are the holy bees.

Holybees is not run by, affiliated with or endorsed by the parish. The history below is drawn from public records, and the hives are simply on the ground behind the building.