A LEYLAND bee keeper is buzzing with excitement this week. For it's National Honey Week (February 10-17) and John Priestley has always been a huge fan of nature's amber nectar.

John, of Glamis Road, started making his own honey after asking his local supplier if he could buy a hive from him.

He was told he needed to learn about keeping bees first and spent a season helping out.

Then out of the blue three hives appeared on the back of a tractor for him.

Each one holds around 20,000 bees in the winter and 40,000 in the summer, producing between 25 and 40lbs of honey per hive.

The taste of the honey changes throughout the year depending on the pollen from flowers.

John explained: "Every honey has a different flavour and you can smell the aroma when you take the lid off. Any expert can tell the difference from the colour alone."

Spring blossom from flowers, such as dandelion make a very sweet honey, for example, but John's favourite is made from willow herbs, which makes a clear honey that looks like whisky.

But a beekeeper's life is never dull. John has managed to block a road for two hours after a trailer carrying the hives crashed and he tried to secure them back on the trailer and calm a swarm of angry bees.

He also had to call out firefighters to help him reach a swarm of bees that had made themselves at home at the top of an old building.

John is a member and former chairman of the Lancashire Bee Keeper Association's Croston and Ormskirk branch which holds summer fairs where people can buy locally-produced honey.