Honey is one of Mother Nature’s most valuable products. Sweeter than sugar - but moderate consumption does not cause weight gain - it is also a powerful antioxidant with all the goodness of fruits and vegetables.
What’s more, it’s antibacterial and antifungal, and can be applied to the skin to remove wrinkles and imperfections! Phytonutrients found in honey have been shown to possess cancer-preventing and anti-tumour properties.
So what does this all mean to Sidhil?
Our head office premises now have another 20,000 occupants in the shape of our latest residents – honey bees, looked after by our two resident apiarists Alastair Fry and David Lewis.
Alastair and David have been interested in bees for some time now and recently attended a beekeeping course run by Halifax Beekeeping Association. When they managed to obtain their bees despite the current scarcity, it seemed logical to house the bees on our secure site – safe, happy and close to the moors of Yorkshire to help with the production of lots of heather honey!
Bees are currently undergoing a significant decline in their native population, so we are delighted to be able to make a small contribution to the protection of one of nature’s hardest workers.
There is a rumour that bees have to fly the equivalent of once round the world to make a teaspoonful of honey – that does make a day at the office seem a breeze in comparison!
And a handful of interesting bee facts:
- They navigate by using a combination of memory, visual landmarks, colours, the position of the sun, smell, polarized light and magnetic anomalies.
- They have a well developed sense of time (circadian rhythm). Honey bees are one of the very few invertebrates in which sleep-like behaviour, similar in many respects to mammalian sleep, is known to exist.
- Honey bee foragers die usually when their wings are worn out after approximately 500 miles (800 km) of flight.
- Honey bee wings beat at a constant rate of 230 beats per second or 13,800 beats/minute.
- The honey bee was a prominent political symbol in the empire of Napoleon Bonaparte, representing the Bonapartist bureaucratic and political system.
Surely Alastair has been warned about smoking
Two Bee or not Two Bees - no, lots of them
If you don't beehave...
That looks like it will be a little crunchy on toast
The bee's knees
Is he making it or breaking it?
First, build your own hive
And here's one we prepared earlier - the hive moves in at Sidhil
Careful
Wow, that's a lot of bees
Don't make them angry
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