Target reached!
£1,000 would allow us to buy another national hive. This would increase the probabil...
Bees Need you: the Buzzing hive 2
London Borough of Merton
Aim
Your support will help set up hives for the benefit of local community and as a reward you will receive local British honey.
Buzzing Hive II is the scaled down version of a previous beekeeping project (Bees need you: the Buzzing hive project).
Your support will help set up 1 hive for the benefit of local community and as a reward you will receive local honey.
Imagine a world without tomatoes, strawberries, almonds... Over 75% of all food crops require pollination and honey bees contribute heavily to this process.The decline of bees is indisputable in the UK and Europe in general. A 2014 study revealed that nearly 30% of honeybee colonies died in the UK during winter 2012-2013 (1). How to slow down the decline?
Our project is to protect bees through beekeeping
Our goal is to set up for a start 1 hive in a local apiary in South West London in a residential and park area where bees can find a large variety of forage with easy access to water.
Picture of the local apiary where we want to put the hive.
What is Beekeeping?
Without beekeeping honey bees will not be able to survive due to diseases, parasites, pesticides, starvation in case of difficult weather and monoculture.
Looking after bees can be quite challenging:
- First, not to be afraid of bees! A colony in a hive counts from 10 000 to 60 000 bees!
- Being able to identify diseases and knowing treatments
- Learning about bees and their environment, their needs, their behaviour etc
- Commitment and time
- regular check of hives
- follow up of growing colonies
- if something gets wrong, act accordingly depending of the situation
- Manual skills are needed for building frames, hives and supers (watch out fingers!)
We have followed 1.5 years training with our local beekeeping association by doing theorical and pratical courses. We are therefore well equiped to take care of bees and their wellbeing!
Picture of us taken while building hive parts in our beekeeping association apiary.
Few additional pictures taken during one of our beekeeping training courses :
Let's do not forget our beekeeping suit !!!
Very nice view of a brood frame where the queen lays her eggs which will become bees 21 days later.
Benefits for the local community
There are several benefits for the local community:
- Protect honey bees
- Increase number of pollinators in the area which will benefit the allotments and gardens surrounding the apiary
- Produce local honey
- Contribute to a better environment and foster bio-diversity in our local area
How the money will be spent
We have adjusted the budget of our initial project.
Consequently, the money raised will be spent to buy one national hive - the most widely used hive in the UK - that we will build afterwards.
Once assembled the hive will look like as below:
Local Honey
As a reward for your pledge, we will give you honey from the project hive. Please see the Pledge section for more details.
We have been eating honey for many years now, however we can assure you that the taste of locally produced fresh honey is absolutely amazing. It is an intense rush of sugar mixed with flower flavour!! Something you will struggle to get from supermarket honey.
The first time we experienced fresh honey was when we had to remove some combs from one of the hives we were looking after as the bees had been messing up in the hive. You can see below how the natural combs look like.
Nice picture of honey cell capping:
A piece of honey comb from a side perspective:
This picture was taken just before we started extracting the honey:
After a lot of hard work, we managed to extract almost 1 kg of fresh honey. It did not last very long however!!
So, would you fancy to have your own jar of local honey?
Pledge information
If you are interested in funding our project, please note that the pledge amounts listed do not include delivery costs. The cost will need to be added to the pledge. However, if you are based in London, we can arrange a day and time for you to collect the honey.
Thank you for your support!
Karine & Arnaud
(1) (http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/apr/07/britain-honey-bee-colony-deaths-worst-europe-study)
This project successfully funded on 16th March 2015