Oxfordshire Beekeepers’ Taster Day 18 Aug 2024

Our annual Taster Day is an opportunity for people who have an interest in honey bees and beekeeping, however slight or serious, to get up close with a colony and get a, ahem, taste for what beekeeping involves.

It also gives us a chance to promote the What is Beekeeping session and OBKA’s Beginners Beekeeping course 🙂

The Taster Day is held at our Training Apiary at Woodstock School and the weather on Sunday 18th August was just about perfect – warm, lots of blue sky and little wind. The colonies were also in a good state, thanks to the hard work of Apiary Manager Andy Pedley and his team of helpers, in that most supers had been removed so it was easy for the group leaders to get into the brood where of course all the real action is.

Two sessions are arranged, morning and afternoon, with around 15 attendees per session. Each session can be split into 3 parts: Welcome and getting into bee suits; briefing and apiary session; and the course hard sell tea, coffee, biscuits and discussions on next steps for those interested.

Welcome and bee suits

These sessions need a lot of planning and organisation. When the course attendees arrive at the school they were met by OBKA Training officer, Dawn O’Reilly. She checked them in and made sure they had someone to take them to where a gazebo, tables and chairs had been set up on the field by the bee garden (i.e. safely away from the apiary and any flying bees).

The aim was to get everyone into a full bee suit if possible and a number of us had brought spare bee suits to add to the OBKA ones. Dawn had made name badges for everyone and I was tasked as badge monitor (given my performance finding the right badge for people I should probably stick to beekeeping…). Our Apiary hosts helped the attendees find a suitably-sized bee suit, helped them get into them and took orders for tea/coffee to have after the apiary session. Once everyone was in a bee suit we were ready for

Briefing and Apiary session

From previous Taster Days we have found it useful to take the attendees through what makes up a hive using the demonstration / training hive. Once this has been done (and David Lord rather smoothly covered up the fact that the crown board and queen excluder were missing!) the attendees were briefed on what to do if they did get stung and then everyone was checked to make sure their bee suits were properly and fully done up. They were then split into groups of 3 or 4, assigned to one of the group leaders, and it was off to meet the bees.

The apiary session is great fun and we try to get the attendees as hands-on as possible. I get the attendees to pass around frames of just foundation, a frame with brood and a frame of stores so that they can see the difference in weights. In my morning session we found the queen; she was unmarked so I got the posca pen and a marking cage and plunger from the bee shed and we had a short training session on how to catch and mark a queen – now that’s what I call value for money! There are of course loads of questions as we go through the colonies but that is the point of the session.

One advantage of the Training Apiary is that there is a variety of colonies and equipment and certainly both the groups I had were interested in the top bar hive once we had finished looking at a colony. We also had the excitement of one of the colonies swarming in the morning, but as they went high up into one of the trees just by the entrance to the bee shed we were not able to demonstrate how to catch a swarm.

Whilst the attendees were at the colonies the apiary helpers were hard at work making teas and coffees in the bee shed. Once the apiary session was over the attendees could collect their bespoke tea / coffee and we headed back to the gazebo where….

Refreshments and next steps

…we helped people out of their bee suits and they could then relax, have their tea/coffee and biscuits and ask any further questions that they might have. We had some jars of OBKA honey for people to taste and as a result, made a few sales of honey.

Dawn then gave the attendees a short talk on the next steps if anyone was thinking of taking up beekeeping – the What is Beekeeping talk in Jan / Feb, signing up for the Beginners Course with the theory sessions and apiary practical sessions.

Some of the attendees were really keen to sign up whilst others were just happy that they knew a bit more about honey bees and beekeeping. Which is exactly what we hope to achieve with the Taster Day.

It would never have happened without…..

This event takes a lot of time and effort to plan and execute. As always it can only happen with a number of OBKA members giving their time before and during the day:

Phil Hart (OBKA Treasurer), David Lord (course organiser), Dawn O’Reilly (OBKA Training officer), Eric Perkins, Gary Thomas, Peter Hawkins, Roger Hinton, Psyona Williams, Steve Freeman, Elise Peyre, and Andy Pedley (Apiary Manager).

Photos credit: Gary Thomas and Psyona WIlliams