October the 21st 2022 was the first National Honey Day and the Lower School’s Beekeeping Club’s first birthday. What a combination!
We took the opportunity to celebrate our birthday by selling our honey in support of the National Honey Day. #NationalHoneyDay. We had thirty-eight jars to sell and with a little enthusiastic promotion we sold out very quickly.
National Honey Day is an initiative to promote the quality of local English honey. There is currently no requirement on honey jar labels to say where the honey comes from. Adulterated honey is a problem that undermines the quality and purity of locally produced honey. This is something we feel deserves more attention. If you would like to know where your honey comes from in the future, please sign this petition. https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/624402/
Rosie Blake, who is a pupil in the Beekeeping Club explained why National Honey Day is so important, and gave us an insight into what she learnt in the Club:
National Honey Day helps people, who like honey, recognise how people are trying to work to help spread awareness that English honey is made locally by the bees from their hives. After the sale of the honey, we practiced hammering to make the frames for the coming season.
We learnt about brood frames which are for the queen to lay her eggs in and honey frames which the worker bees use to put nectar in. The layer which is in between one side of honey and the other is called a foundation and beekeepers put this in a frame to help the bees build their comb. I also learned that wax from the comb can be used to make beeswax wraps. If you want to make honeycomb honey, you must make frames with no foundation because the foundation frames wouldn’t be very nice to eat.
After the bees have made the honey, they also put caps on it to stop the honey from seeping out into the hive, because it will attract predators, especially bears, if they are in that part of the world.
The Beekeeper’s Club has had a successful half term as Thea Loveday, a pupil in Beekeeping Club, records harvesting the honey through putting ‘four of the frames into a spinner that would spin them so fast the honey would run down the side allowing it to fall down into a collecting container’. This was followed by the group jarring the honey, ‘Jarring was super satisfying because you would lift a lever and the honey would all slowly pour out into your jar.’ These Jars were then sold at £4 each on National Honey Day.
