Imagine this… it’s a warm summers day. The air is vibrating with the gentle buzz of honeybees as they go about their work. You can smell the subtle fragrance of beeswax in the air.Looking through the mesh on your bee veil you can see the frame of honey in your hand. You push a finger slowly into the wax, past it’s point of resistance. The honey erupts over your finger. As you put your finger to your tongue you can feel the warmth of the honey, it’s sweetness like nothing you’ve tasted before. You give it a moment for the flavours to settle, it tastes of apple, the very flower it came from that morning.
Damian Appleby, honeybee expert and member of the British Beekeepers Association, is introducing a new course at Avant Garden Centre.
The Bee Experience takes you on a trip into the life of the bee hive using practical demonstrations but disturbing the bees as little as possible.
The aim is to explore the importance of the honey bee, it’s history, what threatens its survival today and how we can all play a part in protecting it’s future.
Using Top Bar hives, Damian is able to give families the opportunity to see bees on the honeycomb, feeding new born baby bees and to watch first hand the efficient operation of the hive. He teaches about how the bees are able to survive the coldest of winters and keep the hive at a steady temperature as well as providing a wealth of information about the honeybees short but industrious life.
Damian said, “We can all benefit from learning honeybees importance to the wider ecology and how much of a negative impact there would be if we lost bees.
“My family has had beekeepers in it for generations. When my great grandmother died they found 1000’s of bottles of mead in the loft space of her house. I developed an interest and was soon fascinated by the honeybees life, so I turned my back on a business career to focus on bees as I thought it was too important not to. Unlike other beekeepers I don’t take the honey from the beehives – I am much more into the preservation of the honeybee.”