Bee Keeping

17June

Over the past couple of years, I’ve had the privilege to help my uncle to both feed the honeybees and extract honey from his hives. All I can say is it’s a great experience, until you get a bee in your hood and it decides to sting the end of your nose. I jest, the hives are full of productivity and can give a great insight into the world of a species that is on the decline. It’s a very interesting thing to delve into a hive and see what they do. Bees account for around a third of the pollination of the UK’s food crops and 80 per cent of flowering plants so delving into their world can be an eye opener.

Also during lockdown I’ve been lucky to capture some of the macro world. In the last couple of weeks, there has been more and more bees visit our garden. In one corner of the garden we have a Ceanothus bush which has been covered in honeybees, bumblebees and butterflies. Here are a few shots I’ve captured of the honeybees.

Honeybees play a vital role in the natural world being one of the many pollinators for plants and flowers. They are part of large colonies, that either live in hives or in wild nests. I’ve been lucky enough to see them at work in a hive. It’s been good to see them pollinating as well. They are wonderful little creatures to watch. Their colonies or hives can have up to 50,000 bees in them working to build the hive, protecting the brood and producing honey. I would say trying to find the queen, can be like looking for ‘a needle in the haystack’ but it can be very rewarding when you do find her.

I’ve put together a smaller project page that is the best place to show this process, whenever I go to the bees and get the chance I will be using this page as a place to add new images and capture this small micro world. I felt this needed its own page to capture it as a photo essay and to show some close ups of this world. Its called Honey Workers

Let me know what you think and if you have any questions do not hesitate to ask.

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