Busy as bees

We have been busy as bees at Devonshire rd Nature reserve.As our beehives got vandalised this summer we had to build a new apiary in our wildlife garden. With funding form Timerland ,match funding and other funders we could start rebuidling a new enclosure.
A bee shed and safety fencing has been placed in the garden.
A bee shed with green roof is an educational place ,where children can see and learn all about the honey bees life, there is bee equipment where children can have a hand on experience to see the life of a honey bee.Children learn to build hives,and learn all about thye importance of this incredible creature.

The new front gate & Apiary where opened last Sunday by Mayor Steve Bullock .
Children had extracted the honey for everyone to taste and people looked throught the window in the bee shed watching the bees go by and the busy hives.

WHAT HAPPENS IN WINTER?

As we don't do many practical activities around the hive.
We concentrate on making supers for next spring & monitoring the hives making sure the bees are warm and giving them extra feeds.
Many insects hibernate or migrate during the winter, but honeybees are more like us, they bundle up and wait for spring.

When winter comes, honeybees form a ball deep in their hive to regulate the hive temperature. This means they stay close together, vibrating their wing muscles to generate heat and keep the center of the hive around eighty-six to ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit. If the core temperature drops too low, the colony will die.
Bees also eat a lot of honey to stay warm, and the fastest way to kill off a hive if you’re a beekeeper is to take out too much honey, too late in the season. Healthy beehives have at least twenty-thousand bees, and that’s a lot of mouths to feed.
Some bees on the outside of the ball will not stay warm enough and will die over the course of the winter, but its for the good of the colony.

With bees one always talks about the colony as a single entity. This is because each bee has a very specific role, but together they work as a unit. You could say each bee functions like a cell in your body. Honeybees start out cleaning the hive and feeding larvae, but will progress to collectors and foragers, and even hive guardians.

Honeybees try their best to keep the hive clean, so on a warm winter day, they clean house and fly a few hundred yards away to use the bathroom! This can be dangerous, though, because if it’s colder out than they thought, the bees might not make it back.
If you like to become a beekeeper too and would like to be involved contact me.
Iris_borgers@hotmail.com or send me a message on the PD page.