Celebrity beekeepers are appropriating our lifestyle. It's infuriating

Telegraph

10 hours ago

You see them with increasing regularity on Instagram and TikTok, looking like astronauts exploring a verdant new planet. Yes, the latest high-status outfit for celebrities and their children in their self-published video content is a white all-in-one with matching hood… a beekeeping suit.
Beekeeping for centuries was a wholesome pastime, an endearing way to reconnect with nature. It was nice; it was pleasing; it was – crucially – low-key. Its higher profile adherents were erudite and quietly thoughtful: Aristotle, Tolstoy, Sylvia Plath and, in fiction, Sherlock Holmes.
Social media buzz
But lately there has been an unmistakable social media buzz around bees and the keeping of them has become ' celebrified' and 'influencered'.
Take the recent posturings of former X Factor star Stacey Solomon, presenter of Sort Your Life Out. The media mum last week posted images of herself, her husband Joe Swash and their children each clad in matching protective clothing as they approached the latest addition to their Essex garden: a hive. This intimate family moment, shared with her six million Instagram followers, was captioned 'The Magic of Bees'.
The idea of Solomon as an earth mother is certainly something of a departure: she has previously been credited with inspiring the ghastly trend for decorating homes and gardens with non-bee-friendly garlands of plastic flowers and installing fence-to-fence fake grass instead of having the bother of an actual lawn, shrubs and annuals.
But fashions have shifted, bees are having a moment and Solomon is there for it. As are Ed Sheeran, Jeremy Clarkson, Sting – of course – and Queen Camilla. And influencers too have joined the bee bandwagon, led by the ubiquitous Hannah Neeleman, or Ballerina Farm, as she is known to her 10 million followers – who regularly posts bee content when not making her own mustard or hand-rearing baby bison.
Undoubtedly though the two celebrity titans who have fuelled this new fashion above all others are Meghan Markle and David Beckham.
In fact, influencer Solomon was herself so influenced by the Duchess of Sussex and her bees that she appropriated the same soundtrack from a recent Meghan post for her own: the sickly-sweet 1960s pop number Sugar Sugar.
The Duchess of Sussex, previously associated with jam, first announced her newfound love of honey and apiculture in her Netflix lifestyle show With Love, Meghan in which the world first saw her at her buzzing hives in what is now her trademark protective suit. 'I'm trying to stay in the calm of it because it's beautiful to be this connected,' she said to camera, while visibly tensing up at the prospect of being stung.
And just last month she shared that inspiring Sugar Sugar -y moment with her three million followers, harvesting honey with daughter Lilibet, prompting media coverage around the world.
Instagram vs reality
So what do veteran beekeepers make of all this?
If there is such a thing as a bee whisperer then that's surely Paula Carnell, whose speciality is 'calling back' bees that have departed their hive, and who has practised and taught beekeeping around the world, from Indian Ocean islands to central London.
She finds she has lately been left feeling 'triggered' by the experience of seeing dilettante, arriviste celebrity beekeepers using their new hobby as a status symbol, she says, when for her it really is a vocation.
'Inviting wild creatures onto your land is a big responsibility,' Carnell says. 'It's not just a new purchase like a designer handbag, but a serious commitment.
'And although people generally think that it's environmentally friendly to keep them, if you set up a colony of honey bees on land where there are already populations of native species of bee, then you may actually be unwittingly damaging the environment and reducing the amount of pollination. So rather than saving the planet, you're hastening its demise.
'And watching these performative people showing off with their bees it can feel like your own committed lifestyle is being appropriated – which is infuriating.'
Becks the beekeeper
David and Victoria Beckham have lately been coming across like characters from a Thomas Hardy novel – 'Far From the Man U Crowd', perhaps – posing for photographs while dressed as Victorian agrarian labourers rather than a 21st-century former footballer and pop-star-turned-fashion-designer. Ever since buying their Cotswolds mansion the Beckhams have pivoted from town to country, adopting waxed jackets, flat caps and designer wellies, while posting about country pursuits: fly fishing, gardening (in pristine white trainers) and now, naturally, beekeeping.
Like the Duchess of Sussex, David Beckham used the medium of Netflix to tell the world about his new interest, shown in full apiarist kit tending to his beehives during a quiet, reflective moment away from the rigours of being a globe-trotting celeb – all captured by the attendant film crew.
Beckham's Instagram, which has 88 million followers, is now a hive of bee-related content, even if he is missing a trick by not setting up a live-hive CCTV feed called 'David Bee-cam'.
And his embracing of bees has already been apparently beneficial in ways beyond honey. He recently met the King at both the Chelsea Flower Show and his Highgrove home, relating afterwards that they had shared beekeeping tips. And, if reports this week are to be believed, the pair will be meeting again soon in a more formal context: Beckham is finally to get the Knighthood he has long craved. This had previously been denied him for several perceived sins - not least describing the honours committee as 'a bunch of c***s' - but he has evidently bee-washed his reputation.
Beckham's Instagram, which has 88 million followers, is now a hive of bee-related content. And so, in the same way that he inspired the 2000s trend for inspirational slogan tattoos in Sanskrit, Hindi or Latin, Beckham is now apparently inspiring the masses to want their own bees. And this may not end well.
A lack of knowledge… and insurance
Amateur enthusiast Pádraig Floyd, who has been keeping bees for 15 years with five to six hives on his Essex garden and allotment, says this is already happening: 'It's long been popular with the chattering classes – it's an established thing with north London types like making your own sourdough – and its popularity keeps growing.'
The financial journalist goes on: 'But it is alarming how some people will act rashly when starting beekeeping. Under certain circumstances, bees can pose a threat to both people and animals. Yet people who haven't got a clue will set up a hive in their back garden and apart from a lack of knowledge, they don't even have any public liability insurance.'
My local bee expert – who once visited my allotment to appraise it for suitability for bees before deciding it was (glamorously) too close to an Asda car park to be a good site – is retired surveyor Geoffrye Hood.
It's now 70 years since he first became involved in bees and he's seen the pastime suddenly take off in the past few years, with numbers in his local north London association rising sevenfold.
He tells me: 'Beekeeping is both a complex and time-consuming field. And the trouble is that if you come to it via watching video clips on social media, you can be mistaken about what's involved.'
'There are some well-known beekeepers who I think are very good,' he continues, and singles out 'Bill Turnbull, the now deceased TV presenter, and Martha Kearney, who likewise presents news. Both of them were excellent keepers because they spent many years learning the craft and didn't just take it up and start posting about it straight away.
'The problem comes when people don't take the time to learn about it properly and then mistakes can be made: if you don't know what you're doing your honeybees can easily reduce biodiversity rather than enhance it.'
What are you saying about yourself when you let the world know you keep bees (and never stop going on about it on Instagram)? You are saying that you care – care about mother earth, pollination, the environment. Even if the truth is a little more complicated than that. But for many of these newbies there is also a second message: you're well-heeled. You probably own several acres of land and you no doubt pay a local expert to do the donkey work, though this is unlikely to feature in your social media.
Beekeeping now sits with having a £100,000 Range Rover and a £1,000 branded barbecue and pizza oven. It is surely only a matter of time before bragging about bees - bumble brags, as it were - become a staple on LinkedIn.
The people I know with smallholdings can go years without taking a holiday, such is the time commitment involved with keeping bees and other livestock. I can't see this suiting many of those influenced into bees by the Beckhams or the Duchess of Sussex.