A Busy Day for Bees and Plants

Despite the overcast weather, the bees are out and about collecting masses of pollen, and the yard is full of plants, with more new stock coming in, as well as plenty of customers.

The bees are bringing in lots of different colours of pollen, some that are a dark blue, some greeny coloured and some bright yellow. This is likely to be pollen from blackberry and willowherb among the other flowers that are out at the moment.

Since the Spring Plant Fair in May, the plant group have raised over £500 at the Friday sales, and if the number of customers continues to increase as it seems to be, they will have made a small fortune by the end of the summer. Excellent news!

Seed Collecting in the Sun

On a warm and fairly sunny Saturday afternoon, the Kirklees Youth Offending Team were out picking cotton grass seeds after an unsuccessful pond dipping session. We were collecting the seeds in the hope that we can sow them at the office and nurture them until they are big enough

to be planted back out on the moors. Hopefully we'll have our own free supply of home-grown cotton grass!

Watch out for other seed collecting and seed sowing activities - check on the National Trust website to see when activities are taking place.

Splitting the bees

We have already had to split our hive to try to stop them swarming - I went out yesterday to get some photos and found that they had swarmed anyway. Needless to say that the camera got forgotten about in the panic that followed!

Luckily the bees hadn't swarmed far and were still in our yard on several plant pots and the table. After coaxing them into a cardboard box with a helping brush from the feather duster, the bees were successfully restored to their hive and so far, they have not swarmed again.

So we now have two hives of bees to look after, assuming the don't swarm again!

Canoeing and Dipping

On the first Tuesday in July we all went across to Hardcastle Crags in Hebden Bridge to join up with the Countryside Team there for a team day. We spent the morning testing out the two canoes for leaks on the two ponds, and taking samples from various spots in the ponds to find out what lives in them.

The afternoon was much more like hard work, extracting logs from the woods and stacking them up ready for the tractor to take them away.

A rather fun and different day, making a change from being out on the moors!

Grand Exhibition Opening

The official opening of the new exhibition room took place on Friday July 2nd, on a relatively sunny and warm morning. The forecast rain stayed away. A mix of councillors, National Trust staff and volunteers and others that had had input into the Heritage Trail and exhibition were invited, and it was a successful turnout. The Examiner also came to take a few photos, so watch out for it in the paper!

We were all taken on a virtual tour of part of the estate, with an audio tour and slide show to show part of the new Heritage Trail which was then followed with Go Potty! A good number of people got involved with decorating their plant pots and sowing their free seeds.

It was an enjoyable and different morning - a good way to finally officially open our exhibition room.