Heritage Hub Honey and Candles

In July 2021, the Bee Team were finally able to extract the first lot of honey from the beehives in the community garden. As we didn’t yet have equipment, we went to a beekeeper friend in Tuffley with the frames of honey and extracted it there. From the first batch we got 28 pounds of honey, which was a wonderful surprise.

By October, we had our own equipment and so we were able to extract our own honey on site, which was very exciting. We set up the equipment in the staff room, put our masks on and spent a fun afternoon manually spinning our frames and getting a good workout! This batch gave us another 8 pounds of honey, which was a real bonus. Towards the end of the season, it’s best to leave the bees with as much honey as possible over winter, but we decided we had enough surplus on one of our hives to take some of their honey.

We’ve been able to sell most of both batches to colleagues and friends, but we hope that the bees survive the winter (at the time of writing it’s very cold, but they should be huddled together with enough food to keep them going through the next few weeks) and we can then get a spring harvest from them once they start foraging again. We plan to sell this honey properly so look out for it on reception!

We’ve also been experimenting with other things to make from the bees. Head of Archives Service Heather brought in a huge amount of beeswax from her father who used to be a beekeeper, and in preparation for using our own beeswax (as yet we don’t have enough surplus) I’ve been working out how to make candles and another colleague has made some beeswax food wraps. We hope to also sell craft products made with the wax in due course too.