The mother’s “passion” led her to share the house with 50,000 friends

A Liverpool woman has revealed what life is like living with more than 50,000 bees at home.

Amanda Mason, who lives appropriately on Sugar Lane in Knowsley Village, is practice manager at MyDentist. When she’s not tending to Formby’s eight-surgery practice, the 49-year-old looks after a hive of tens of thousands of bees.

Amanda’s daughter, Valentina, introduced her to beekeeping half a decade ago. While the 22-year-old was studying at a university in the city, Amanda encouraged her to take a course in her spare time.

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As a result, Valentina enrolled in a beekeeping course and after a few years asked if she could have a beehive at home, sparking Amanda’s new passion.

The mother-of-two, originally from Waterloo, told the ECHO: “I’m a keen gardener and I’m forever elbow-deep in compost and plants. Beekeeping is great for my mental health and getting back to nature after a day of screens and technology really helps ground me. It has a calming influence on the busy everyday life I have.

“I am very protective of them, especially in the winter months when there is virtually no way of knowing how many of them are left or how well they are surviving. We can top them with sugar fondant and try to protect them as much as possible, but really they are just left to the elements. I’m always so relieved to see them again in the spring.”

Amanda’s hive has grown substantially since 2019 – so much so that she said it would be “impossible” to count all the bees, especially in the summer months. During the warmer season, the hive expands by adding more “floors” to accommodate their growing numbers.

A memorable moment in Amanda’s beekeeping journey was her first honey harvest a few years ago.

She said: “Harvesting honey is a messy but incredibly rewarding process. Honey is usually extracted once or twice a year, but this is very dependent on the weather. Last year we didn’t harvest at all because it rained so much, we didn’t want to risk the bees running out of supplies. The year before, we took around 60 kilograms of honey from the hive.”

Amanda inspects the bees at least once a week, checking for signs of disease, if the queen bee is laying down well, and making sure the hive isn’t getting overcrowded. Amanda’s Queen Bee is affectionately named after her great aunt Rita, who is in her mid-90s and described as “the matriarch of our family”.

She said: “Most people are shocked that we have so many. However, it really doesn’t bother anyone, thankfully, and if we didn’t tell people, you’d never know the hive was there. I like to sit in the garden and watch them come and go, they also like to drink from the fountain, it’s like a little bee social club on a hot day.”

Moving forward, Amanda said more needs to be done to protect the “community” of bees where she has found “peace”.

She added: “Less plastic grass and plants would be really beneficial for bees. More wildflower areas, less concrete and asphalt, and education from a young age about how important bees are to us and life on our planet. It really saddens me to see people trying to kill a bee. I would make watching the bee film part of the national curriculum if I could.”

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