Bee plea creates a social media buzz

When a South Lakes homecare company posted an urgent plea on Twitter to help save their bees they were inundated with advice.

Local and national bee experts, including a lecturer at the University of Cambridge, got in touch to offer tips and guidance.

Now Kendal-based Westmorland Homecare is planning to obtain some more bees and offer ‘meet the bees’ sessions to elderly clients at social events once they eventually restart after the end of lockdown restrictions.

The buzz began when Dr Joshua Macaulay, who set up Westmorland Homecare in 2017 with Dr Chris Moss, decided to buy a beehive and some bumble bees.

“Everyone in the office had been talking about how we needed to help the local bee population. Bees work together for the common good, which emulates what we do with Westmorland Homecare,” said Dr Moss.

The hive was put in Dr Moss’s garden but, after a while, some maggots were discovered in it.

“Most of the colony disappeared, so we put a plea out on Twitter to ask for some advice to see if we could save the last few bees,” said Dr Moss.

The Tweet stated: “We are experts at caring for people – just struggling a bit with bees!” It contained a photograph of the hive, which they had named the ‘NHS Nightingale Bee Hospital’.

Their plea elicited a Tweet from Beekeepers Hour, which shares news, pictures, events and tips with other beekeepers around the world. It suggested they contact University of Cambridge ecology lecturer Lynn Dicks, whose Twitter account states she is working on sustainable farming and evidence-based insect conservation.

She suggested maggots often appeared in large numbers at the end of a bumble bee colony cycle to ‘clean up the mess’, so perhaps the colony was nearing its end anyway.

Westmorland Homecare was also contacted by local bee experts Karen Harper and Jacqui Cottam, who run The Bee Team, a volunteer-led organisation that aims primarily to encourage, enthuse, educate and inspire children and young people in the world of beekeeping. It is based at its apiary at Heron Hill Primary School in Kendal and its young beekeepers are from the local primary and secondary schools.

They explained that, in a normal year, they welcomed community groups to the school’s apiary during the summer season, where its young beekeepers could share their knowledge about bees and beekeeping. They also had an observation hive which, in normal times, they took out into the community to such places as schools and care homes.

Karen Harper said: “It is a privilege to look into a hive and observe the bees at work. The wonderful scent of a hive, the ability to feel the heat the bees generate and the different sounds they make while they go about all their various activities is quite addictive! It offers a fascinating insight to a small creature that is massively important to us.”

Now Westmorland Homecare is hoping the Bee Team can pay visits with the observation hive when social events for clients begin again after the end of lockdown restrictions.

“We like to offer engaging and interactive events at our social events and many of our clients enjoy animal therapy, so a visit from a travelling colony would be wonderful,” said Dr Moss.

“Offering interesting experiences to clients, such as observing bees, is part of our ethos of care.”

After being fed some honey water, the remaining bees in the company’s hive remained for another two weeks before flying off. But Westmorland Homecare plans to ‘do some more reading about beekeeping’ and to obtain a fresh colony.

“Looking after the environment in which we live is very important and, even though we are going through Covid-19, we should not forget these things,” said Dr Moss.