by Jamie Savage
“The hum of bees is the voice of the garden.” – Elizabeth Lawrence
There’s an extra hum in Bridgeland this summer! We’ve welcomed Bridgeland’s newest honeybee colony and queen “Queenie”. These hard workers will be roaming through our gardens and lawns, searching for the sweetest nectar. The colony will be foraging all summer to expand the hive, prepare for winter, and produce delicious honey to be shared. The hive will be dripping in sweet honey this coming fall, ready for harvest.
Queenie and her colony are one of the first honeybee colonies installed and managed by ‘withSavageLove Apiculture’ through the Bee to Crop partnership. We have reimagined small scale, bee-centric beekeeping to bring bees to prime pollinating locations throughout our communities to support local agriculture, native flora, and share our love for health and wellness. Our mission is to reconnect our communities to their food source; learning about where the food we place on our tables is grown and the natural cycles that make it all possible is so important to establish healthy, sustainable lifestyles. We hope our hives serve as a beacon for our never-ending connection to the earth.
This colony joined the Bridgeland-Riverside community June 1, 2024. The “nuc colony” was acquired from Albertan beekeepers and installed into our hive boxes to grow and expand into a full, thriving colony. A “nuc colony” is five frames from an established colony that is separated with worker bees and a queen to begin a new colony. The queen bee is much larger than worker bees, and for our hive, is marked with a green dot. Can you spot her? Since being installed, the bees have already began building out more wax comb to lay eggs, store pollen, and produce honey.
The BRCA community centre is a perfect location for a honeybee hive because of the abundance of flowering vegetable crops and native flowers throughout the community. Honeybees have a flight radius of around three kilometres, meaning our littles bees will be out foraging and pollinating in gardens, backyards, and walking paths filled with wildflowers. However, you may not notice the extra buzzing around the streets, bees are dedicated workers and are on a mission to collect pollen, nectar, and water. It takes a careful eye to catch a bee at work, so if you do, take a moment to pause and enjoy it. Honeybees are very gentle creatures; they’re much more interested in the next flower than with us.
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