May's meeting was a real buzz, as we all zoomed off to St John's Church Hall for a talk by Elizabeth Ready who, with her husband Derek founded a family business from a hobby here in Horsham. (No more puns, I promise.)
Shining through was the pride she so evidently feels for her husband and son as she told us the history of their adventure into the world of bee keeping. The story began many years ago as she and Derek stood in a supermarket car park in Horsham watching a bee keeper retrieving a swarm, and how it needed only a little cajoling for Derek to actually approach and chat with the beekeeper and fulfill his long held dream. By the following day they owned two empty hives, and shortly afterwards bee swarms to fill them. At their peak, Derek and their son Joseph, owned 50 hives, had become part of the bee keeping fraternity and were spending every weekend amongst bees and bee keepers. Elizabeth told us how each hive needs a visit each 10 days in the summer. No wonder Derek and Joseph were busy. The flip side to this is that Elizabeth spent her weekends at home, but this then gave her the time to begin experimenting with the beeswax, making soaps, creams and cosmetics. Slowly, step by step she learnt how to create and refine her recipes. Lockdown gave her the time to invest two years training to gain her Advanced Diploma in Organic Cosmetic Science.
Forget cute and cuddly, the life of a hive is far from it. Elizabeth told us so many amazing facts about bees and the life of a hive. Within a hive, there are probably 60,000 bees, one queen, 200 male drones and the rest are the female workers. Within the hive, the workers will 'decide' to create new queens. They build a series of extra long cells, into which they place an egg, and once it has hatched into a grub, feed it a diet of Royal jelly which means that it develops into a queen. This virgin queen makes a series of mating flights. Up to this point the male drones have drifted about the colony, doing nothing but eat. Then as the queen takes off, flying up to 50 metres above the ground they follow and she will mate with up to 60 of the males, all of whom then die, having fulfilled their sole function. The fully mated queen then leaves the hive with some of the workers and sets up her own colony. She remains on the lowest tier of the hive for the rest of her five year life span laying up to 1,000 eggs a day, before she too dies or is deposed. The daughters of the hive are the workers. They collect the eggs, place them into cells where they feed and care for them until the grubs pupate before they emerge to take their place in the life of the colony. Bees are responsible for maybe 80% of all the polination that occurs - no bees, no food, no us.
Last summer Elizabeth finally witnessed the 'waggle dance.' For an hour she watched, fascinated as a single bee rhythmically moved forward, retreated, flapped its wings and somehow transmitted to the others, information as to exactly where she had found a good source of flowers and nectar. Each bee has a stomach the size of a pin head, will collect nectar and pollen, and will make one twelfth of a teaspoonful of honey in her entire life. Do not take it for granted please.
Elizabeth then passed round bags containing some of the soaps, balms, creams and serums that she has developed over the years. The beeswax is sourced locally, all the ingredients are natural and organic. It was lovely to be able to test some of products, which are stocked locally or may be bought directly from Bee Cosmetics. We were all given a voucher for 10% off orders from the website beecosmetics.com
We were pleased to welcome members from the BBH afternoon WI group to join us for the talk and I think everyone would agree that it was a most fascinating and fragrant evening! Please take a look at the gallery of photos below to see what we got up to.
Please click on the photo to see the full image:
Thanks to everyone who continues to support the Horsham Matters Food Bank with our monthly donations of what tins, packets and non perishables that they are short of.
Join us next month for Stool Ball at the Cricket club. Please click on 'next meeting' above for more information.
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