February – Weathering the Storms!
Well, the 28th soon snuck up on me! Once again i’m writing our blog a day before it’s due to go out, you’d have thought after two years writing these I’d have got the hang of it!
February has been a fairly typical winter month here, we’ve been busy jarring and working in the workshop to get all our boxes and frames ready for the season. The plan for this season is to increase to 200 hives… which means lots more hives need building and the wooden frames that go in those need assembling.
One of the most exciting thing that’s been happening this month is increase in stockists! We have taken on about five new stockists in the past month and hopefully many more throughout March!
You can find more about our stockists – here
The first of the real spring flowers are out now, Snowdrops, Crocus and Hellebores are out and providing fantastic early food for our bees! I often get asked about planting for bees. I think the best thing many of us can do is to try hard to provide early, and late flowering plants that extend the season of our pollinators of course this doesn’t just help Honey bees, it helps bumble bees and Solitary bees as well as butterflies and other key pollinators.
Pictured is an early flowering variety of an ornamental Cherry tree. For those following our social media you’ll have seen the video of the bees making the most of this tree in the sun last week!
Of course I can’t do an update about this month without mentioning the few weeks of terrible weather where it seemed storm after storm was coming through. The wind worries me more than any other weather during the winter, the hive roofs are fairly light so even with bricks on top they’re known to blow off leaving bees with little shelter from the almost certain rain that follows! I’m very happy to say however that our sheltered wintering sites did their jobs and kept the worst of the weather off the hives and so we didn’t lose any roofs and the bees are still all looking healthy and well! Over the next couple of weeks we will start doing more frequent checks to ensure they have enough food because as the weather warms up the amount the queen lays increases causing the bees to rapidly use up their stores!
This month also saw the launch of our brand new bee Jewellery! Two beautiful pieces hand made especially for us. Watch this space though because we have plenty more coming as well!
I must also mention that Mothering Sunday is the 27th March! We have our beautiful Honey Hampers back in stock with amazing updated labels!
You get: 1 jar of Honey, a beeswax candle, Honey dipper, Wildflower seeds and an information card about us and our bees!
Thank you all so much for reading our little update and as ever supporting us! Next month I’ll be telling you all about how we have got on moving bees to their spring sites ready for the Oil Seed Rape to come out in April.
Come along and see us at Market Bosworth Farmers Market on the 27th March from 9am until 1:30pm
Thank you
Matthew Ingram
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