On Wednesday 10th July 2019 Ivan and John visited the Centre and gave a talk on honeybees. The first part of the talk Ivan showed us clips and talked us through information like the different names for bees in the hive; Queen Bee, worker bees and Drones.

We learnt that there are a lot of worker bees in a hive, normally around 50,000 – 70,000. The bees travel about 3 miles in every in every direction per day, trying to find honey. When a bee finds honey it flies back to the hive and does a ‘waggle dance’ which is a movement in a figure of 8 showing the other bees the direction of the honey.

After all the information, we got to see bees in a hive that Ivan had brought. The Queen had different markings and a green dot to distinguish from other bees. The hive we saw was smaller and had a glass viewing panel and had roughly 30,000 bees in it. We got to see ‘grubs’ ( a baby bee waiting to grow) and one bee was actually born in the Blackstone! On some of the removable panels we got to see honey that the bees built, it looked like the shape of a 50p.

We learnt a lot about bees and how important their job is. Everyone really enjoyed the talk, and we even got to try on the bee keeping mask and gloves.