Student finds 'bee paradise' in heart of city

A university student says he has found a "bee paradise" in the heart of Oxford after pursuing his passion.

David Maxen, 23, from St Albans in Hertfordshire, splits his time between studying cancer science at the University of Oxford and taking care of tens of thousands of bees in two hives at the Great Meadow, owned by Merton College.

He took up the unusual hobby earlier this year after spending a couple of years researching beekeeping and "going down a rabbit hole" of watching YouTube videos about it.

Mr Maxen had initially posted on neighbourhood app Nextdoor, asking the Oxfordshire community to put his beehive "in someone's back garden" and was "overwhelmed" with replies.

Mr Maxen says beekeepers "have a tendency to start thinking of the bees as their pets"

"Sometimes there'd be a really nice story involved - there are a lot of people whose parents had kept bees when they were a child and they now want to reconnect with beekeeping," he explains.

"[Others] were maybe too old to bee keep themselves but really wanted to get involved."

But he changed his mind over potential stings and him visiting someone else's space during "unsociable times".

Instead, he reached out to about 20 university colleges and Merton College offered "a beautiful wildflower meadow here that they'd happily house my bees".

"Now, I'm in a bee paradise right in the heart of Oxford."

'Bees are like pets'

He first became interested in having his own bees about two years ago.

"I was supposedly revising for exams, but then I accidentally went on YouTube and ended up going down a three-hour rabbit hole," he says.

"I was watching Just Alex and he's quite a young guy as well, so I thought 'if he's able to do beekeeping, there's no reason I should kind of wait till I'm older'."

Mr Maxen says beekeepers "have a tendency to start thinking of the bees as their pets".

"There are somewhere between 10,000 and 60,000 of them... but maybe you could view one hive as one big pet," he explains, comparing it to the emotional support some might get from a dog.

Mr Maxen (right) said his friends, including Thomas Joyce (left), visit the hives to get involved with beekeeping

Mr Maxen says his friends were initially "understandably surprised" by his hobby.

"But they've all got super into it and I've had lots of friends coming down to the hives to get involved."

He even started naming the queen bees after them, such as Bee-ola after his girlfriend Ceola and Badeline after his friend Madeline.

Mr Maxen says his "dream" is to harvest between 50 to 100 jars of honey, twice a year in spring and autumn.

"That way I'd be able to give some away for free to my friends and family which is the most important thing for me," he says.

"But also, it would be very cool to get my own honey to one of these garden markets or markets that we have in Oxford, and be able to sell them to the public as well."

Mr Maxen hopes to harvest his own honey and give it away to friends and family