Beekeeper CV Examples & Writing Guide

This is a CV for an apiary manager with nine years in commercial beekeeping. The name and the bee farms are invented. Look at what sits in the top third: colony count, winter losses, pollination contracts and the licence category. Those four lines are what a bee farmer wants to know before anything else.

Beekeeping hiring is small and word of mouth carries a lot, so your CV mostly has to prove you will not cost the owner colonies. Four things do that.

• Colony numbers you personally worked, not the size of the business. "Managed 1,200 hives" and "worked at a 1,200-hive bee farm" are read very differently. Say which one is true.
• Winter loss percentage. This is the single number that separates a beekeeper from someone who owns bee equipment. If yours was bad one year, give the range and the reason.
• How you handle varroa. Naming your monitoring method and threshold tells an experienced bee farmer more about you than any certificate. Alcohol wash counts, sugar roll counts, and a stated treatment threshold read as competence.
• Driving and equipment. Bee farms that move colonies do it at night, with a lorry or a 4x4 and trailer. The right licence category, a forklift certificate and a clean driving licence can matter as much as your bee knowledge.

Group them so someone can skim. Bee biology and colony work first, then equipment and driving, then the business side if the job involves selling.

• Colony work: inspection and brood assessment, queen finding and marking, requeening, splits and combines, swarm control, feeding programmes, wintering preparation
• Health: varroa monitoring by alcohol wash and sugar roll, treatment rotation, nosema and tracheal mite awareness, American and European foulbrood recognition (both notifiable), small hive beetle awareness and wax moth control
• Breeding: grafting, cell builders, mating nucs, instrumental insemination if you have it, stock selection for hygienic behaviour
• Production: extraction, uncapping, filtering, bottling, moisture testing with a refractometer, wax rendering, creamed (soft set) honey, comb honey
• Equipment: frame building and wiring, box assembly and painting, forklift, lorry-mounted crane, flatbed loading and strapping, hive netting
• Compliance and records: BeeBase registration, reporting suspected notifiable disease, veterinary medicine records, reading pesticide spray notices from neighbouring farms, hive records app or spreadsheet apiary records, food hygiene and labelling for honey packing
• Physical and seasonal: night moves, 12-hour summer days in full suit, lifting full boxes repeatedly, travel for pollination and the heather

There is no licence to keep bees in the UK. What exists is voluntary registration, official disease inspection and voluntary qualifications, so name the body and the year for anything you list.

• Apiary registration. Registering your apiaries on BeeBase, run by the National Bee Unit, is how bee inspectors know where colonies are when disease turns up nearby. American and European foulbrood are notifiable, so show you know the reporting route. Arrangements differ in Scotland, so check the rules where you keep bees.
• Beekeeping qualifications. The British Beekeepers Association runs a ladder of assessments and modules, starting with the Basic Assessment and moving through the General Husbandry Certificate to higher levels. The beekeeping associations in Scotland and Wales run their own schemes, and the Bee Farmers' Association is the trade body for commercial bee farmers.
• Driving. The licence category is what lets you move bees for a bee farm: often C1 for a 7.5 t lorry, while most car licences cover a 4x4 and trailer. List the categories exactly as they appear on your licence.
• Equipment and safety. A forklift certificate, IOSH Working Safely, and Emergency First Aid at Work are all worth a line, especially with anaphylaxis risk in a team.
• Food handling. If you bottle and sell, note your Level 2 Food Hygiene certificate and that you label honey to the honey regulations.

Hobby beekeeping is real experience, but only if you present it as work. Ten hives you have kept alive for six years is a better credential than a weekend course.

1. 1Put your own colonies on the CV as an operation with a name, dates and a colony count. Say what your winter losses have been, year by year if they were good.
2. 2Add the things a commercial team does that you have also done: splits, requeening, extraction, feeding, mite washes. Give numbers even when they are small.
3. 3Say what you can lift and how long you can work. Commercial bee work is heavy, hot and fast, and the biggest reason new hires quit is that nobody warned them.
4. 4Get a forklift certificate and an Emergency First Aid at Work certificate before you apply. Neither costs much and both remove an obstacle.
5. 5Volunteer or work one season for a bee farm, even part time. One paid season on a real team changes how every later application reads.
6. 6Join your local beekeeping association and say so. It signals you will keep learning and it is where the jobs get mentioned.

One page. Bee farms are small businesses, often family-run, and the owner is reading your CV on a phone between apiaries. Plain layout, no photo, no graphics, no date of birth. Send a PDF and also paste the text into the email body, because a lot of these jobs are filled straight from an email.

• Put colony counts and locations next to each employer, not buried in bullets.
• Be honest about seasonality. "Apr to Oct, 2023 and 2024 seasons" is normal in this industry and looks better than a hidden gap.
• If you are applying to a large honey packer or a research centre, they may use an applicant tracking system. Mirror their words: apiary, colony, varroa, pollination, extraction, queen rearing, migratory.
• Add a line about references from previous bee farmers. In a small industry, a named referee who will pick up the phone is worth more than a certificate.
• Mention whether you have a bee sting allergy history and carry an adrenaline auto-injector only if you choose to; you are not required to disclose it, but a team leader will want to know before your first day in an apiary.

“The first thing I look for is a winter loss number. Anybody can say they love bees. If someone tells me they held losses at twelve per cent on two thousand hives and then tells me how they monitor mites, I will find work for them even if I was not hiring.”