The Bee Team

Meet The Bee Team! Karen and Jacqui use beekeeping as a catalyst for teaching young people about environmental issues and encouraging their personal growth. Read more about their work below:

The Bee Team is a volunteer-led group based within the grounds of a primary school in Kendal, Cumbria. Karen is also a teacher at the school, and Jacqui is the Chair of the Governing Board. We bring bees and young people together, providing a safe and supportive environment where everybody is valued and coached in both the techniques of beekeeping and valuable life skills.

As children, we learnt about nature, knew tree names, could identify wildflowers and knew every bug in our gardens. Sadly, that’s not the case anymore – many children are disconnected from nature. We wanted to make sure all the children who come to our school and work with The Bee Team gain knowledge about nature so that it’s not lost. Because how sad would it be if the next generation couldn’t identify an oak tree or an acorn, for example?

It may sound like a cliché, but children really are our future. As luck would have it, they are also some of the most motivated, vocal and passionate advocates for nature there are. So teaching them, opening their eyes to the world around them and allowing them ownership of their space for nature has been incredible!

We’ve worked alongside them to create positive change by providing ‘space for nature’ in our school grounds. We started by building an apiary for honeybees, and teaching the children about pollination and their life cycle. But it soon became clear, to us and them, that our bees don’t need ‘saving’ and it’s wild bees and pollinators that are seriously under threat. It became incredibly important for us as beekeepers to do as much as we could to ensure our bees did not have a negative impact on wild populations of bees and other pollinators.

Over the last five years, we’ve embarked on a journey to transform our school grounds into a haven for wildlife and biodiversity, creating wildflower areas and woodland, changing our management of our hedges, incorporating wild margins and, of course, working hard to plant for all pollinators.

We have around 20 solitary bee houses around our apiary, many of them with viewing sides, meaning the children get to see leafcutter bees and mason bees constructing their nests in the tubes live and in front of them. We’ve learned that if they can see and understand something, children become the most ardent and passionate nature advocates!

We’ve had nothing but support from our school community, and engaging the wider community is often about educating people so they know why things may look a little less tidy than they expect. For example, we have a large ‘wild area’ which, to some, may look a little unkempt…but once the children, teachers and visitors saw the tunnels and nests made by bank voles and shrews, and then saw a barn owl hunting one early morning before breakfast club, they could see for themselves – if you build it, they will come!

We welcome other schools and community groups to our site to share our work, running ‘Homes and Habitats’ workshops, getting children hands-on in creating their own habitats in their schools and home spaces. This means they take important messages home to inspire more people to help wildlife.

We hope to extend this work and in the new year are planning on more raised beds at the site, not only to provide pollinator forage, but also to grow more of our own food organically, so the young people see first-hand the link between growing food sustainably and how our needs as humans interact with the world around us.

In the coming year, we want to run more pollinator workshops, have more visitors to come and hopefully be inspired by what is possible, even if you only have a window box! We have started a long but wonderful journey of discovery alongside our young people the positive mental health benefits of connecting with nature, being outside, taking a moment of peace for yourself…and what an amazing journey it already is!
 

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