October 2026 Meeting

For our October meeting we invited Gerry James of the Reigate Beekeepers Association to give us a talk about ‘beekeeping’. Twenty two members and one guest attended.

What an entertaining and surprising talk it was. Gerry started by telling us about how his wife bought him a book about beekeeping for his birthday. That led to a one day course of working with bees and that in turn led to 14 years of beekeeping as a hobby.

We were told that there are 238 species of bees in this country, but they all have the same hive operational setup. Basically, the worker bees (females) run the hive and collect all the pollen and nectar which they put in store to survive the Winter when there is no foraging. The Queen bee starts laying eggs in the Spring when the nectar and pollen collection begins. Initially 50 to 60 eggs are laid per day, and this increases to about 1500 eggs per day from June onwards. The reason for this number of eggs to be laid is because the average lifespan of a bee is usually around 6 weeks, and at the height of Summer there can be 60,000 to 80,000 bees in a hive. The male bees are called ‘drones’ and there are far less of them than worker bees. The job of the drones is to mate with the Queen bee in order to create a future Queen bee when the current one becomes less productive.

Regarding the storage of the honey, the wax cells are cylindrical when built, but become hexagonal when connected to the adjoining cells. Another interesting fact is that bees only age when they are flying, so during the Winter they hibernate and emerge ‘at the same age‘ in Spring. The drones, however, are not so lucky as they are prevented from returning to the hive and die off.

There were many more fascinating facts about bees such as when the bees start swarming and how to encourage them to store more honey and how they communicate by sense of smell. Also Gerry brought along jars of honey, beeswax candles and beeswax lip balm which we were able to purchase. If you want to learn more then we would recommend that you contact The Reigate Beekeepers Association.

Our next meeting is our AGM on 3rd November at the Christ Church Centre 8pm.

Janet Bailey (822333)