Firstly my Big Pink Blob who loves me has a friend who has just built a hive and is off to get some bees to put in it. We aren't sure of the finer details, but that's roughly it.
Blob looked about her little garden and decided that she has no room in which to keep a bee hive. But out of the blue she received a newsletter from Innocent.
Innocent are an environmentally sound company that manufactures smoothies and juices and they are apparently very nice indeed. I wouldn't know because I am a cat and cats don't actually like fruit, juices or smoothies.
Although Blob doesn't have too many because they are quite expensive, she does enjoy the newsletter.
So this weeks newsletter arrived and what is included...? How to make a bee house! So Blob is off to find some paper straws and is going to make a bee house in her garden.
I realise that the uninitiated may not know what the difference is so here is the very simple explanation. (It has to be very simple because my Blob is not particularly bright!)
Bee hives are large wooden structures full of tray like things that the bees live and work in. The hive has a queen who is the boss, and the whole hive revolves around her and her baby making skills. Its like a mormon community, but instead of multiple wives, the queen has multiple husbands and lots and lots of servants.
The bi-product of having a bee hive is that you can nick some of the honey!
A bee house is a smoothie or milk carton with the bottom cut off, and stuffed with paper straws and insulation and it hangs about 4 ft off the ground in your garden and bees can come and live in it. These are not the same type of bees as the ones that live in hives. These are vagrant bees, or bees with social problems, or bees that come under the 'care in the community' schemes, or homeless bees that just want a warm dry place to live or bees with asbos who have been shunned from their communities.
A bee house does not have a queen, although i suspect that some of them may be a little camp at times. It does not have a social structure or a jobs for all policy, but if they want to go out to the pub together at night it would be ok. You also don't get any honey from a bee house, but you can get honey in the local farm shop and then replace the label so it looks like you got honey from your bee house!
Anyway, i hope you enjoy the website that is linked here and i hope that there will be many bee houses springing up in gardens everywhere.
Bob likes bees!
Bob!
An excellent plan. Do not try to eat the bees though, Bob. They won't like it at all and will bring their friends round to beat you up.
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