Adrian Leighton is a Little Hartley based amateur beekeeper, who has been looking after 35 hives at his property for the last several years.

His beekeeping journey began in Springwood where he worked as a teacher at St Columba's Catholic College, and beekeeping was set up for the agricultural department.

"When my wife and I moved out to Hartley nearly 11 years ago everyone decided to look in our direction because we have the property and the room for the beehives," Mr Leighton said.

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He said Hartley turned out to be a good area to service the bees.

Now Mr Leighton works with friends who own an apiary in Bowen Mountain. Together they make produce under the Three Sisters Honey brand.

"Our ambition is not to be honey robbers it is actually to be beekeepers, that's the difference.

"We do produce and sell it [honey] but our primary reason of course is to look after the bees and the environment," he said.

He said in his role he feeds and waters them and most of the time he leaves the bees to their own devices.

"It's an interesting farming thing, for the majority of the time you really don't have to do anything.

"I prefer to leave them alone, there's no point interfering," he said.

He said when it came to harvest time, in a good season he would harvest two to three times a year but due to the drought his most recent harvest was over a year.

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"We haven't harvested here because there is no food around, no rain means no blossoms which means no pollen, no nectar and nothing for the bees so we try to manage them as carefully as we can," he said.

However, Mr Leighton said they had been able to harvest in Bowen Mountain due to the warmer climate and more moisture.

He said harvesting would usually take a full day of labour and was a lengthy process.

"We set up, boil water to sterilize the equipment and buy pre-sterilized jars, after all we are dealing with a food product," he said.

He said everyone would then get their suits on and put pine needles in a smoker to mask the bees pheromones.

"The smoke calms them down because they think there's a fire so they fill themselves up with honey and get ready to leave," he said.

Mr Leighton said the hives they used were easily movable and manipulable for harvesting the honey.

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"We put a queen excluder in the bottom box to prevent the brood (babies) getting into the honey, above that is what is known as a super and if you put a queen excluder on you're almost guaranteed to have only honey in the top boxes," he said.

He said the frames with the honey were spun in closed conditions.

"Each frame has around 2.3kg of honey if full and then those go into storage and we use them next time. It's a continual swapping system," he said.

He said the honey was then put into 20 litre pales, gets filtered and is then jarred.

"We try find a warm day so it's not too hot and the honey flows.

"It gets jarred, labelled and sold," he said.

He said it was sold to a number of people including locals and people down in Lane Cove.

"Our big customers are organic people down the road who sell at markets and former students who run pubs and institutions and use honey in cooking. We also sell to friends," he said.

Mr Leighton said he had always been fascinated by bees and always wanted to keep them.

"When the opportunity came we grabbed it because my wife likes to do it as well," he said.

He said bees were fascinating to watch and cooperative to work with.

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"How they know what they know for such a tiny little creature is absolutely mind boggling when you watch them all at work.

"They do work hard, one bee produces around one teaspoon of honey in their life span of eight weeks," he said.

"They are clever little creatures."

Mr Leighton said if you wanted to manipulate nature to have honey it was important to look after the bees and make sure they are healthy.

"All we have done is manipulate nature and I think it is important we do look after bees, we consider ourselves very lucky that we've got the space to be able to do it and enjoy it."