With Beekeeping Club celebrating a year since it started, pupils have begun to write small blogs about what they get up to in beekeeping club as part of their Junior Beekeepers Award. You can read what has gone on so far in the term below. These blogs will continue to be uploaded onto this page, throughout the year so make sure to come back each month and catchup with what is going on!
November:
On Friday the 11th of November Beekeeping club visited our hives. Our job was to feed the Bees; as we take their honey, we need to give the bees fondant, something made of natural sugars so that the bees can store it so that they can make babies and feed them.
We went to our two hives and first Mr. Brook gave one of the hives a small crack with the hive tool at the first hive’s side and we held the smoker at the entrance to tell the bees that we were there. We then lifted up the hive a little to see If it had enough food in it and it was quite heavy, so they did have quite a lot of food (there were lots of Bees!) They had eaten up their last package of fondant, so we gave them another packet. We then went over to the second hive and did the same thing; it was heavy but not as heavy as the other one, they had also eaten up all of their fondant (and also had loads of Bees in), so we also gave them another package! After that we went back to school and went home.
Issi Singi
October
National Honey Day is a day where beekeepers from around England bring honey to sell to raise awareness for where the honey comes from. It 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.
Norwich Lower School celebrated National Honey Day by selling our own locally made honey. We sold each jar for £4, and we made £190.00 from the jars, and we also sold out. I think we made a good profit from it.
After the sale of the honey, we practiced hammering to make the frames for the coming season. I learnt that to make a square, solid, I needed to use triangle shapes.
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 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 have to make frames with no foundation. 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. After we finished our practicing hammering to make the frames, that was the end of our beekeeping club.
Rosie Blake
September
Friday 16th
This week was our first session, so we went down to the hives and put on a queen excluder, which allowed bees to go down but not come back up again. As well as putting that on we also took off the two supers (where the bees make honey) so that we could see them working.
Tuesday 20th.
The queen excluder had worked! So, there were only about three bees left in the in supers. Our job for today was to harvest some of the honey, there were already two supers that had been carried back from the apiary in the Head’s Garden. As we got to work, our first job was to gently take off the caps (bees wax) covering the honey. Once we had completed this we put 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. While some people were de-capping and some spinning, all the honey also had to be strained to remove unwanted wax particles until it was perfect.
Friday 23rd
This week we were jarring the honey. We had a bigger group this week, so we split into two. One group would be jarring will the other was either doing a word search or naming parts of the beehive. Jarring was super satisfying because you would lift a lever and the honey would all slowly pour out into your jar.
Thea Loveday
