Buzzing with Bees
By John Beavan, head beekeeper at Paradise
It’s all happening at Paradise this summer and autumn, with our bees exceedingly busy creating their first season of honey.
Their hives are really buzzing right now, with more than 80,000 bees in each hive collecting nectar and turning it into that delicious gold.
Recent visits to the hives have allowed Paradise occupiers and their staff the opportunity to find out more about the beekeeping process and to learn about how our essential pollinators do what they do.
All the bees in the hive have different roles – from the Queen bee (whose job is to create new bees), male drone bees (whose job is to help the Queen produce her offspring) and worker bees (who do all the nectar collection from flowers and plants around them and help to create the honeycomb back at the hive, as well as attending to the needs of the Queen).
Showing people around the hives and getting them to interact with the bees in person is hugely rewarding and helps all of us understand our place within nature.
These bees are part of Paradise now and everyone who works at or visits the development should understand more about the vital job bees carry out and their role at the heart of many ecosystems, including urban ones.
Without bees, our lives would be very different – and our food staples more expensive. Bees carry out an essential job in pollinating most plants that we use for food. The fact they then produce honey as a by-product gives us another wonderful food thanks to them.
Bees are a great way to learn more about environmental ideas and concepts and understand our own place within them.
Renowned for their hard work, resilience and determination to get the job done, bees can fly up to three miles to reach suitable forage and a hive the size of that at Paradise sees the bees fly the equivalent of going to the moon every day.
One of the recent visitors to the hives was Lucy Oliver of PwC. She said:
“Seeing everything close up really opens your eyes to what the bees do both for us as people and for the environment around us. I can’t wait to find out more about the extraction process later in the autumn and then tasting the honey.”
The extraction process will see the honey created by the bees taken from the hives and transferred to jars to then be given away to people across the estate. This will be a key moment in the story of bees at Paradise, and will underline the importance of their place in the city.
