Bees and Beekeeping

Our meeting in May began with the usual singing of 'Jerusalem', and then our President Penny started the business for the evening. We hold our birthday meeting in June so final arrangements were confirmed. The refreshments for the birthday party take the form of a 'bring and share' supper which involves all the members.

At most of our meetings we hold a competition, with a theme associated to the speaker's topic. Points are awarded and totalled at the end of the year. The winner of our Competition Cup this year was Jean White. Several members also take part in a Scrabble competition, and this was won by Diane Cuttle.

President Penny introduced the rules for voting on this year's two resolutions. We could vote for both of the resolutions, one of the resolutions or none. The two resolutions this year are: 'Appropriate  care in hospitals for people with dementia' and:' Avoid food waste, address food poverty'. The group voted unanimously in favour of both resolutions.

Our Outings Secretary detailed several trips that were coming up throughout the year and we had an outings report from a visit to another WI's birthday party.

Finally, we were able to welcome Barbara Egerton to the meeting. Barbara has been involved in beekeeping for 40 years. She is a farmer's daughter and quite used to handling livestock so, needing another challenge, decided to try beekeeping. Barbara then went on to give us a fascinating insight into the work of bees.

In every hive there are thousands of worker bees and drone bees and one very special bee, called the queen bee. Her only task is to lay eggs, which will grow to become  worker  bees , drones and more queens. The worker bees feed and clean the queen, so she can spend as much time as possible laying eggs; up to 2000 eggs per day. The worker bees are always female. Drones are  male, and their main job is to be ready to fertilise the queen.

When the bees land on a flower they suck the nectar up and store it in their stomachs. Back at the hive, they convert this nectar into honey. The bees store the honey in a honeycomb cell and seal the top with wax. The wax comes from the bees too, from four pairs of wax glands on the underside of their abdomens. Barbara brought some beeswax in to show us, it smelt lovely!

Bees work very hard collecting nectar from  flowers but this process also assists pollination. Every time a bee lands on a flower, a little bit of pollen sticks to their feet. Some pollen also falls off as they fly about, and if it lands on another plant, pollination occurs, which means the plant reproduces. Bees pollinate two thirds of the world's crops and flowers, which means they make two thirds of all our plants grow. This is an important reason for protecting our precious honey bees.

Honey bees need carbohydrates and protein to survive, and they get both of these from flowers. The carbohydrates come from flowers' nectar and the protein comes from pollen. The bees convert the nectar into honey and cap it off in a beeswax cell, sealing the honey into the honeycomb so they can eat it later or it is harvested by the beekeeper.

Bees stay in their hive in Winter and form a cluster around the queen. The bees on the outside will switch places with bees on the inside, so they take turns at being warm. In this way, the bees can survive the cold. When the temperature increases the bees will leave the hive in search of flowers.

In February they visit hazel, pussy willow and crocus flowers, enjoy oil seed rape, sycamore and hawthorn in May and garden flowers throughout the Summer.

Pollinated honey has proved to be wonderful  for hay fever sufferers. Honey has very healing properties - it can be used as a sedative, laxative and a cough and cold remedy.

Finally, Barbara finished her fascinating talk by allowing us to taste some of her honey and jams. They were delicious.

Our next meeting is on the 8th June which will be for members only. However, visitors  are very welcome at our July 13th meeting when Roger Hailwood will be giving us a talk on' The History of the Arboretum'.  We meet in The Parish hall at 7.30pm. Further details can be obtained from Penny Bailey through the link below.