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World Bee Day 🐝 – Saturday 20 May

Celebrating our favourite day of the year, and this year’s theme is all about bee-ing engaged!

It’s a fabulous opportunity to acknowledge the critical role bees play in our lives. These amazing little creatures pollinate around 70% of the world’s crops that we rely on for food. Research estimates that one out of every three mouthfuls of food we eat depends on honey bees and the pollination process. Wow!

Keen to bee engaged? Here are just a few easy things you can do:

  1. Grow bee friendly plants in your garden. Look for the ‘bee friendly’ logo at your local nursery or garden centre. Choose plants that flower at different times of the year so there is always something tasty for the bees. They particularly love blue and purple flowers. If you have room, flowering bushes and trees provide fantastic forage.
  2. Provide water for the bees – a shallow bowl filled with a few pebbles and rainwater is ideal.
  3. Mow less. This month is ‘no mow May’ so leave your lawn and grass verges for wildflowers to bloom. You’ll also get some weeds, but bees and pollinators love them too.
  4. Provide habitat. Bees need safe places to nest and hibernate. Create a bee hotel or a nesting box for solitary bees, or leave some areas of your garden undisturbed for ground-nesting bees.
  5. Avoid using pesticides, herbicides, and other chemicals that can harm bees.
  6. Buy honey from your small, local beekeepers to support their work in looking after the hives and keeping the bees healthy.

If you’d like to find out more about bees and beekeeping visit us at a local market. We have a regular slot at the brilliant Kings Norton Farmers’ Market and we pop up at the Kings Heath Artisan Market.

To find out more information about this special day please visit the British Beekeeper Association’s website, and follow #WorldBeeDay.

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World Bee Day 🐝 – Saturday 20 May

Celebrating our favourite day of the year, and this year’s theme is all about bee-ing engaged!

It’s a fabulous opportunity to acknowledge the critical role bees play in our lives. These amazing little creatures pollinate around 70% of the world’s crops that we rely on for food. Research estimates that one out of every three mouthfuls of food we eat depends on honey bees and the pollination process. Wow!

Keen to bee engaged? Here are just a few easy things you can do:

  1. Grow bee friendly plants in your garden. Look for the ‘bee friendly’ logo at your local nursery or garden centre. Choose plants that flower at different times of the year so there is always something tasty for the bees. They particularly love blue and purple flowers. If you have room, flowering bushes and trees provide fantastic forage.
  2. Provide water for the bees – a shallow bowl filled with a few pebbles and rainwater is ideal.
  3. Mow less. This month is ‘no mow May’ so leave your lawn and grass verges for wildflowers to bloom. You’ll also get some weeds, but bees and pollinators love them too.
  4. Provide habitat. Bees need safe places to nest and hibernate. Create a bee hotel or a nesting box for solitary bees, or leave some areas of your garden undisturbed for ground-nesting bees.
  5. Avoid using pesticides, herbicides, and other chemicals that can harm bees.
  6. Buy honey from your small, local beekeepers to support their work in looking after the hives and keeping the bees healthy.

If you’d like to find out more about bees and beekeeping visit us at a local market. We have a regular slot at the brilliant Kings Norton Farmers’ Market and we pop up at the Kings Heath Artisan Market.

To find out more information about this special day please visit the British Beekeeper Association’s website, and follow #WorldBeeDay.

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Why do bees swarm?

If you see a big, swirling cloud heading out across the rooftops and trees, it could be a swarm of honeybees. They have left the safety of their hive and are flying off to find a new home – a hole in a tree, a chimney or an empty hive. It's an awesome sight! 

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Swarming bees are full of honey - carrying supplies for their new home - so they usually don't sting. But it's best to stand well back just in case!

Swarming is an important, natural process. It happens when a colony of honeybees splits and the queen takes a large number of worker bees with her in search of a new home. It's the way they reproduce. As soon as the old queen reaches the new nest site her entourage builds wax honeycomb so then she can lay her eggs and there’s space for pollen and honey stores.

Meanwhile in the original hive site new queens are hatching. Another one or two queens might leave the colony to set up a new home but one will stay to rule over the original hive. In this way the colony becomes two, three or more colonies.

Honey bees mostly swarm early in the season from late April to June. So this is a busy time for beekeepers!

Swarming early in the season gives the bees enough time to set up their new home and gather plenty of stores to see them through the winter. Beekeepers put out bait hives to try to lure a passing swarm. We also ‘artificially’ swarm our colonies which means separating the brood from the queen and flying bees. This splits the colonies and the urge to swarm goes away - usually! 

So if you are lucky enough to see a swarm of bees, marvel at this force of nature and then find your local swarm collector here: https://www.bbka.org.uk/swarm#swarmmap 

 

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How do you move a honeybee colony?

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