Save the Bees - School Beekeeping Challenge

Hi, I'm Lawrence Edwards from Black Mountain Honey, and welcome to the Save the Bees School Beekeeping Challenge. I am a bee farmer from North Wales. Instead of looking after cows or sheep like a normal farmer, I look after colonies of honeybees. We give the honeybees a home called a beehive. We give them access to flowers where they forage for nectar. If they get ill, we give them medicine to make them better if they need it, and then we extract honey from them that you can eat for your breakfast. In a single colony of bees, there can be up to 60,000 bees in that unit. Now, 60,000 is a really, really big number. That's equivalent to the number of people that might go to Old Trafford for to watch Man United in a football match. All of those bees that live in that single colony have a very different job to fulfill. Some bees go out and gather food, so they go and forage on plants for nectar. That's what bees eat— nectar. Some bees are guard bees, so they're like security guards that stand at the entrance to protect it from wasps and other things that might come and try and steal their honey. Some of the bees don't do that much, and they just spend a lot of their time in the hive being lazy. They're the boy bees. But really, the boy bees do have a very important job to play, but they don't do a huge amount around the house and leave a bit of a messy room. And then there's the most important bee in the hive, which is the queen bee, and she lays up to 1,500 eggs a day, and then the eggs turn into baby bees. Now, we all know it's really, really important to save the bees, but this just doesn't apply to honeybees. We want to save all the bees. So as saving all of the bees is so important, in this video I'm going to set you 5 challenges to help save all of the bees. So I'm going to read you out 5 challenges, and I want you to go away in groups or with your teacher or with your friends, or however your teacher wants to split it up. Go away, try the challenges, and then come back and we'll go through some of the answers and we'll have a look at what you've done. So here's the challenges. Good luck completing them all. Challenge number 1, I want you to try and list as many species of bee as you possibly can. So you can go away and you can draw the bees, or you can take some pictures of them, or you can download them from the internet. However your teacher wants to do it, let's try and list as many different types of bee as you possibly can. So we're talking about honeybees, bumblebees, and there's lots of other different bees as well. So use your imagination, list out the species, maybe draw some nice pictures identifying all of the different types of bee. So as I said before, bees visit plants and trees to forage for nectar. So nectar is a sticky sweet substance that comes from plants. So challenge 2 is I want you to go away and research what plants and flowers bees like to visit to get hold of this nectar, and again have However your teacher wants to do it, maybe write a list or draw some nice pictures of the plants. But I want you to identify as many plants and trees as possible where the bees visit to forage for nectar. Challenge three. So we know it's important to save all the bees, but I want you to discuss with your friends, with your parents, with your teachers, however you want to do it. I want you to discuss why is it important to save the bees? Why does everyone say? We need to save the bees. There must be a reason for it, and I want you to find that out. Challenge number 4, and my personal favourite challenge. I want you to identify some ways in which you as a class or as a school can save the bees. So you can do something yourself, loads of different ways that you can do this. I want you to work out as a project how you can save the bees. And a little clue here is think about where the bees live. And think about what the bees eat. That's a really good couple of clues to help you work out some ideas as to how you can save the bees. And the final challenge, challenge 5, is I want you to try and identify and maybe again draw a picture of some of the fruits and vegetables that are pollinated by bees. So bees fly around and they pollinate these fruits and vegetables. I want you to list as many as you possibly can, all of the different fruits and vegetables that are pollinated by bees. So that's the 5 challenges. Go away with your teacher, have a break, come back in a day, a week, a month, however long it takes you to do all of those challenges, and then we'll go through the rest of the video and I'll give you some answers, and we'll take a look at some of your really cool ideas on how you're going to save the bees. So I have every confidence you're going to come up with some fantastic ideas to save the bees. I'm really looking forward to it. Make sure you draw me some nice pictures, take some videos, show me what you're doing, And maybe you can send them in to me and we'll do a bit of an update. So take a break now, go and complete the challenges, and come back when you're finished. So in the meantime, I'm going to show you a little bit of the stuff that we get up to at Black Mountain Honey. We keep about 100 production colonies here. We take the bees to various places to go and forage on the different plants. We extract lots of honey. We sell honeys in the shop. We plant seeds and plants to help the bees and improve their natural habitat. We do absolutely loads. So if you want to kind of follow us on social media, see some of the stuff we do, Take a look at our website, look at our hive adoption schemes. There's loads of stuff to keep you interested, but take a look at what we do. Right, so how did you get on with your challenges? Did you come up with lots of useful information on how to save the bees? And most importantly, did you have fun while you did it? I'm hoping the answer to that was yes. Let's take a look at some of the answers and let's take a look at some of your projects. Right, so challenge 1 was try and identify, maybe draw a picture of as many different species of bee as you possibly can. So there are over 20,000 different types of bee living in the world. That's a huge number of bees, and I hope you found out some really unique and different examples to show to your group and to tell your teacher. So I'll just list out a few of the ones that I know off the top of my head. So you have the honeybee, you have a tree bumblebee, you have a white-tailed bumblebee, you have a red-tailed bumblebee, You have a mining bee, a masonry bee. There's lots of different solitary bees. There's so many different bees. Like, that's literally just off the top of my head. There are 20,000 more bees than that. So if you've got any of those on the list, well done. And if you've got any of those that aren't on the list, you've done really, really well. So congratulations. Now, if you said wasps, you're not quite right because a wasp isn't a bee. Now, it looks quite a lot like a bee. It can still sting you. And it flies around a lot, and it looks similar to a bee as well, so it's yellow and black, but it's not actually a type of bee, it's a wasp. But wasps are really, really important. They play a very important role in our ecosystem, and they do a lot of things, and they get a bit of a bad rap. So we like wasps as well, and we want to save the wasps. Right, so challenge 2, we asked you to list as many possible flowers and plants where bees visit to go and forage on nectar. Now across the world there are 40,000 different plants and flowers where bees visit to go and collect this nectar. So here's a list of some of my favourite ones. The bees definitely prefer some flowers and plants over other ones, but here's a list of my personal favourites. So you have dandelions, brambles, apple, pear, cherry, peaches, willow, heather, Himalayan balsam, rosebay willowherb. They're my personal faves. They're the ones that we find a lot of the bees forage on across North Wales, but there's another 40,000 potential plants and trees across the world where bees forage to collect their food. So I hope you've got some good answers for those. I hope you drew some nice pictures. I look forward to seeing them. So challenge 3, I wanted you to go away and discuss why it is important to save the bees. Now bees, and I'm talking about all bees here, not just honeybees, Bees have been in decline in terms of the overall number of species that are present in the world and the number of bees as well. A decline in the bee population is a really bad thing for the worldwide ecosystem. Bees pollinate a lot of our plants and food to give us our fruit and vegetables, and without the bees, we'd really struggle to produce enough food to live. So the bees are really important. They pollinate our plants and they provide us with food. And that's why it's important to save the bees. And different plants can only be pollinated by different bees, so honeybees can't pollinate all of the plants. A lot of plants can only be pollinated, for example, by bumblebees. So when we say save the bees, we say save all of the bees— mining bees, masonry bees, solitary bees, bumblebees, honeybees. We want to save them all, not just the honeybees. So challenge 4, we asked you what could you do as a school or in groups or with your teacher to help Save the bees. And this is definitely my favourite challenge because it's hands-on and practical, and I love going outside and doing stuff. So there are loads of different things that you could do to help save the bees, and I said think about where they live and think about what they eat. And if you think about those 2 things, they're really good areas to focus on in order to help save the bees. So in terms of where they live, you can give them somewhere to live. You could maybe make a little bee box. So if you research the type of box that you would need to make for a bumblebee, same way that you'd put a birdhouse up for a bird, you can put a bumblebee house up for a bumblebee. So if you research the, the size and dimensions and the holes that you need for that, that's a really nice project that you could do at school. That's a great way to help save the bees. Now solitary bees, they don't like boxes because they don't live in nests. They live on their own and they like the thin tubes to live in. So if you looked at kind of like a mining bee or a masonry bee nest, You could build a specific bee box for that specific bee. So you can build 10 or 20 different types of bee box to give the bees somewhere to live. So I think that's a really nice idea for schools to do that— build some bee boxes, put them around the school. Hopefully you'll attract some wildlife and some pollinator species into your school, and then you can watch them and learn about them. And then in terms of food, you can plant all sorts of different seeds and flowers and plants for the bees to eat. So what I would do is, if you're going to plant a tree, try and look for a tree that's unusual to the area. Make sure that it's a bee-friendly tree and plant that in your school or in your garden. That way, when the tree blooms and you have flowers on the tree, the bees will come to it and they'll eat that nectar. Another thing you can do is you can spread wildflower seeds for the bees. So wildflower seeds are perfect because they spread themselves naturally. Now that means that they, they grow and you get a big seed pod and then they just disperse those seeds naturally. So in year 1 you have 1 plant and then in year 2 you might have 5 plants and it just gets bigger and bigger and it self-seeds and provides a really great pollinator habitat for all species of bees. The final way that I'm going to say that you can help a bee is that you can give it a little bit of So, if you see a bee in your garden and it's a bit slow and it's not moving very well, it might actually be a bit tired. It might not have the energy to fly back to its nest. So, what do you think you should do if you see a bee like that where it needs a little bit of food? So, the answer is to give it some sugar water. So, I know some of you might say give it some honey, and you're really good. That's a great answer because bees do eat their own honey. But it's actually a really bad thing to feed bees honey because you don't know what's in that honey, and that can harbor diseases that can make the bees ill. So if you see a bee in your garden, what you want to do is give it a bit of sugar water. And all you do with that is you mix up a bit of sugar with a little bit of water, put it on a spoon, and just offer that to the bee. The bee will eat it, and then it should fly off. Definitely don't feed it any honey. So the final challenge, challenge 5, was list out all of the fruits and vegetables, and I hope you've drawn some nice pictures where the bees visit to forage for nectar. So I'll give you a list of some of my favorites, and there's some really nice fruit and vegetables there. So in terms of fruits, we've got raspberries, blueberries, strawberries, peaches, apples, pears, plums— pretty much every single fruit that you can get in the supermarket. Maybe 90% of them They're pollinated by bees. Bees play such an important part in the pollination of fruits and vegetables. You really want to help save all the bees, otherwise you might not be able to have strawberries and cream when it comes to a nice sunny day. So I really hope you enjoyed the Save the Bees School Beekeeping Challenge, but what I need you to do now is I need you to spread the word. So I need you to tell everybody you know, so your friends, your teachers, your parents, your aunties, your uncles, And you need to educate them and tell them why it's important to save the bees. And remember, what did we say? Not just saving the honeybees, we're going to save all the bees. The bumblebees, the masonry bees, the solitary bees, the mining bees, and the honeybees as well. We want to save all the bees. So spread the word, tell everyone you possibly can, send them the link to my video. They can complete the challenges as well, and then they can spread the word even further. Let's get the message out there to everyone. We want to save Now, I'm really interested in how you've got on in your project, and I'd love to see kind of some of the work that you've done. So if you've drawn any pictures, I'd love to see them. If you've taken any videos, anything that you've done, take a picture of it, take a video of it, and send it to me to one of my social media platforms. So I'm on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube. Send them to any of those, and what we will do is we will share them across the world. So we'll share them with all of our followers, and we'll encourage them to share them throughout their networks as well. So what that means is that your work could be shared across the whole world, and everyone can see how well you've done to help save the bees. Now because you've done so well with your projects, we want to give you a little bit of a prize. So what I'm committing to is for the first ten schools that complete the Save the Bees School Beekeeping Challenge, we're going to give you each. 30 packets of Black Mountain Honey wildflower seeds. So what you can do with these seeds, you can plant them in the school, watch them grow, you get beautiful displays from these seeds, and then what that will do is that'll encourage lots of different bees all to come into those seeds and forage on the nectar, and then you can watch them and you can learn from their behaviour. What we're also going to do, like I said, for the first 10 schools that complete the challenge, We're going to give you a Black Mountain Honey gift box. So in the gift box you have some honey, a dipper, some seeds, some postcards. It's all presented in a nice 100% plastic-free packaging box, and what you can do with that box is you can either give it to the best contributor to the class, or you can raffle it off and maybe buy a tree, or buy a bumblebee box, or buy something for your school to help save the bees. So all you need to do to be included in those first 10 schools Do the beekeeping challenge, take some pictures, connect with me on social media, send me in the details and some evidence of what your school's done, and I'll send the seeds and the gift box to your school for you to plant the seeds and raffle off the gift box. So finally, thank you so much for taking part in the School Beekeeping Save the Bee Challenge. Means a lot to me. It's a real passion of mine to help save the bees, and I really think you've done a great job with all of the stuff you've done in your projects and your challenges. So thanks very much for watching, and I'll see you soon.