This year has been a buzzy one to date, with a lot more workshops, face-to-face meetings and shows and we couldn’t bee happier!
Our education workshops have been going down well and help us to fulfill one of our charitable objectives of ‘Keeping the skill, heritage and culture of beekeeping alive in Scotland’. Many members and non-members have so far this year enjoyed learning about beeswax and how to produce beautiful products from their own hives, as well as the traditional art of skep making.
We continue to focus on Young Beekeepers in Scotland and were delighted to have so many engage with us so far, as well as having several schools and young beekeepers volunteer as stewards in the Honey Tent at the Royal Highland Show in Edinburgh where they entertained and educated 10s of thousands of visitors across the four days. We were also very grateful to Vegware for receiving thousands of compostable ice cream spoons for this show, which we used as part of our honey tasting. Everyone loved the different types of honey to sample and visitors were reassured that we were looking after the environment as well.
A great big thank you to everyone at Vegware for your monthly donation, we are delighted so far this year to have given away 3,600 ‘Bee Happy and What to Grow’ leaflets, 4,742 bee friendship bracelets and 895 pollinator-friendly seed packs to local beekeeping groups, primary schools, Beavers, Brownies, Royal Highland Show Honey Tent visitors and other groups across Scotland, from Aberdeen, Abernethy, Ayr, Dingwall, Fife, Lanarkshire, Nairn, Newbattle to Speyside.
The bee friendship bracelets also made their way to Slovenia in July, to the International Meeting of Young Beekeepers (IMYB) where Team Scotland gave them out to participants from over 30 countries across the globe. We’re also delighted to share that out of over 60 jars of honey taste tested from across the world at the competition, Scotland’s Phacelia honey was voted the tasted!!
We are looking forward to the remainder of this year and shall continue to ensure we meet our main charitable aims of supporting honeybees and hobby beekeepers across Scotland. We are hosting our annual beekeeping convention at Baldragon Academy in Dundee at the end of September with the help of pupils and members of Baldragon Beekeepers’ Association and can’t wait to welcome over 200 beekeepers there.
And we couldn’t do any of this without our many volunteers, members, and supporters like you, Vegware.
