Breaking news! I just heard from Warren Bader of Plan Bee Ltd and he gave me some fantastic news. NLC have provided funding for the school’s Bee Project for another year! I am so excited and couldn’t wait to share this great news with you all.
The Bee Team is proud to unveil
the label design for our jars of honey. These will hopefully go on sale at some point in November.
Keep checking back for more information!
Today we had a surprise visit from Meik from Plan Bee Ltd to do some honey harvesting! It would seem that Queen Lorde has been very busy. Meik told us that he had to split our hive during the summer and will probably have to do it again next week because the hive is so overcrowded.
This was a huge surprise to us all as we were very concerned about the number of bees in the colony after replacing out first queen. Splitting the hive removes some of the bees from the colony, preventing a swarm.
When we think of a swarm with think of angry bees swirling around like a living tornado. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. A swarm is how a hive naturally reproduces.
The queen will leave the hive with a large group of workers, sometimes 60% of the hive. The rest of the colony stays behind with a new queen. The bees that leave with the other queen surround her and protect her while around 20-50 scouts go out to find a new place for them to live. While this is happening the queen releases a pheromone that keeps the bees relaxed. Bees are at their calmest when they swarm and can be handled quite safely, if you know what you are doing. NEVER APPROACH A SWARM WITHOUT A TRAINED BEEKEEPER PRESENT. The bees are very vulnerable during the swarm and will act to protect themselves if they feel threatened.
When the scouts find a safe place for the colony to live, they go back to tell the others where to go to find their new home. They do this by doing a ‘waggle dance’. This means the bees do a bit of twerking – shaking their bodies in a certain direction for a certain length of time. The direction of the dance lets the bees know which way to travel and the length of time they dance for tells them how far to travel. All the bees then travel together to their new home and start to build their combs again. Swarms usually happen in the spring to allow the bees time to stock up their new home with honey to get them through the winter.
Our colony has been split to stop the hive getting overcrowded and the bees swarming at the wrong time of year.
In my last post I was worried we might not have any honey to harvest this year, but Meik managed to get almost 10 frames full of delicious, organic honey from our hive. I managed to convince Meik to cut us a little from the comb and let our staff have a taste. It’s has a lovely, light floral flavour. Hopefully, we’ll have some jars of the yummy stuff soon! Which means the Bee Team better get on with their label designs. However, our ladies were less than impressed and poor Meik got a sting for his troubles.
Don’t worry though, we didn’t take all their honey, so the hive will have plenty to feed on over winter. We also gave them some lovely sugar crystals to keep them happy in return for all their hard work this summer.
Hi everyone!
Welcome to a new school year at Braidhurst! I hope you have all had a lovely holiday and a ready to get stuck back into learning.
Our bees haven’t been holidaying over summer, but have been working extra hard to grow the colony under the new queen, Lorde. Unfortunately, the weather has been against them. Cool, wet conditions prevent bees from foraging for nectar and pollen. This means it has been particularly hard for our ladies to build up their stores of honey for the winter. This also means that we may not get a honey harvest this year.
As some of you may know, a modern hive is made up of several layers. The bottom layer is called the brood box. This is the layer where the queen lives and lays her eggs (brood). The bees also store honey in there to get them through the winter. On top of the brood box we place a queen excluder. This stops Queen Lorde venturing into the upper part of the hive, keeping her and her eggs in the one place. The upper layers are called supers. These layers are set up exclusively for the bees to store honey and is where we would harvest our honey from.
However, because we had an unproductive queen (RIP Queen Beyonce) and a very wet summer we have been unable to add more than one super to the hive. We won’t know until mid-September whether or not the bees have stored much honey in the existing super or if it is worth our while adding the second. If they have not laid down much honey in the super we won’t be able to harvest any at all, or we would risk starving the colony over winter.
So get those fingers crossed for a gloriously sunny September so our ladies can get a last glut of foraging done before winter.
We received a bit of bad news last week. Our Queen, Beeyonce, was not laying enough eggs to sustain the colony. This would mean the colony would collapse and die before winter was out.
Sadly, the decision was made to kill Beeyonce and replace her with a more productive Queen. She was killed on Friday and the hive was given 48hrs to become clear of her pheromones, otherwise the workers would kill the new Queen.
Our new Queen, Lorde, was delivered before 10.30am this morning, and hopefully, she will get straight to work.
The Queen is dead, long live the Queen.
This blog will be written from two different view points, mine and the pupils involved in the project to really give you a feeling of what has been happening since September 2014.
I had only been teaching Geography and Social Subjects at Braidhurst for a year when our Head Teacher, Mr. Hannan, approached me on the stairs with a brightly coloured leaflet in his hand. He had been at a Head Teachers’ Conference and had met my head teacher at my previous school, Mr. Sommerville. Mr. Sommerville had told him about my previous environmental projects and spotted a stall about introducing bee hives into schools. “Miss Logan would love that.”
“I’d like you to look into this Miss Logan” said Mr. Hannan. A quick e-mail to the company, Plan Bee Ltd, and we scheduled a meeting with David Craig and some other teachers from across North Lanarkshire to discuss the project in more detail.
By the end of November Warren Bader, Plan Bee’s chief Bee Keeper, had come out to the school to talk to all of our pupils about the importance of pollinating insects and what it would mean for the school to have a hive. He also set us a challenge. Our hive was plain, white and a little dull. Warren gave us 4 concepts to to draw inspiration from when designing our hive: Scottish Authors, Bannockburn 700, The Common Wealth Games 2014 and The Centenary of World War I.
Mr. Brandon and Mrs. Ballantyne, our History Teachers, had already arrange a beautiful Armistice Day tribute and were in the process of organising a Christmas Truce Football tournament, so it was felt that the World War I theme would compliment their efforts.
Our Art department rose to the occasion magnificently, creating a whole new design unit for S2 and S3 based on a bee hive panel. The pupils’ work was really fantastic.
Every member of staff in the school received a voting slip to choose the best art work from across S2 and S3. 5 winners were chosen for the five faces of the hive. Denisa Bednarova and Zafar Khan from S2 and Nicole Collumb, Emma Ewart and Zoe Oliphant from S3 were the lucky winners. Not only did they have their art work placed on the hive, they also received a jar of Plan Bee’s delicious honey and art supplies for their efforts.
Then is was time to paint the hive…
Welcome to Braidhurst High School’s Bee Blog. In this blog you will find out all about the school’s apiary, our progress and the importance of pollinating insects like honey bees.
The Bee Hive Project was started in September 2014 thanks to the generosity of David Craig and North Lanarkshire Council. In that time a group of pupils (and a very nervous teacher) have gone from confusing honey bees with wasps to full time bee keeping. Without the help of the lovely Warren Bader of Plan Bee Ltd this project would not have been possible. Please feel free to browse our posts and galleries, make comments or ask questions. Pop over to Plan Bee’s website too to see how they are leading the way in improving biodiversity throughout Scotland.
http://www.planbeeltd.com/
We hope to see you back again soon!
Miss Logan
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