Hive Helpers

10/10/2026

Moth recording with Philippa at Farnham Library Gardens where we are working hard with Farnham Town Council and Farnham Library to safeguard nature 💪🏼 💚
Moths are important pollinators- we just often overlook them because they mostly go about their business after dark 🌙

If you’d like to be involved in preserving nature in these beautiful gardens, please email [email protected] to find out more.

10/10/2026

Badshot Lea Community Orchard still has fruit! Delicious apples they are too! 🍎 🍏

I had two for my breakfast when I was there picking yesterday with John from Badshot Lea Bloomers.

True, many apples are high up, you’ll need a picker (or someone else’s picker in my case! Note: John was showing off his extendable one!) or a walking stick works well for snagging the lower ones.

However, the ground is thick with windfalls, lots of them fine to collect- you can chop off the bad bits at home.

A great way to spend a quiet hour or a less quiet but educational way to amuse the kids John implores local people : Don’t let this good, FREE food go to waste. Anyone can access the site - it’s located at the end of Goslings Place, Badshot Lea, to the right of the playground.

09/10/2026

Don’t forget it is the MINIBEASTS Club fungi walk this Sunday (11th October), so if you’d like to join in email: [email protected] to book your space. 🍁🍄🌰

07/10/2026

Big thanks to Myung-Hye from Wrecclesham Conservation Group for showcasing pollinators after dark to our youth group this evening 🥰 yesterday, it was wonderful moths!

04/10/2026

To the beekeepers out there: buy local! Disease/parasites can come in with imported queens. Check the origin of queens you buy - British companies frequently import, country of origin is in the fine print (or not, sometimes… as I have noticed).

One simple choice that will help protect our bees.

With the threat of Tropilaelaps edging closer, there's a genuinely powerful step every beekeeper can take and it starts with where we source our queens.

Tropilaelaps can cross borders through illegal imports, so the less we rely on importing queens, the smaller the risk of disease becomes. It's our collective demand for queens that keeps the import market going so if we can reduce the demand, we can reduce the risk.

So when you need a new queen, a trusted local beekeeper should be your first port of call.

A few practical things to consider:
- Aim to overwinter at least one nuc as your own insurance against winter losses. This reduces your reliance on outside suppliers at the very moment demand is highest.
- If you do need to buy in, ask where the queen has come from. Was she imported? A queen offered in early April is unlikely to have been born and mated here in the UK so a few well-chosen questions make all the difference.

The threat from Tropilaelaps is real, but the everyday decisions we make as individual beekeepers add up. Those simple, practical choices really can protect our whole community.

03/10/2026

Grim/sad post alert 🚨
Any guesses what this is..?
For those of you who guessed fox poo, you’re correct.

Foxes are opportunistic scavengers and are also coprophagic. This means they eat poo, specifically dog faeces. We humans feed our dogs nutritious food which results in rather nutritious poo, and it is common for foxes to eat dog poo, especially when prey is scarce and poo is plentiful.

Poo is especially plentiful when people bag it, but don’t take the time to bin it. Foxes will tear open the bag to eat the poo inside and frequently end up consuming the plastic too. The plastic poo in the picture is proof. The plastic eventually accumulates and knots inside the fox’s gut, causing pain and blockages they cannot pass or bring back up. The fox ultimately dies a slow and unpleasant death.

I’m making this post because I see bagged dog poo on the side of paths or flung in bushes on every single walk I go on. Presumably, people think if it’s bagged, a child won’t step in it. Or maybe if it’s in a biodegradable bag it will rot down harmlessly (it won’t- studies have shown special industrial conditions are needed). Or maybe they think they’ll remember to collect the bag on their way back (they won’t…and even if they do it is still a tasty treat for a passing fox).

If you bag you poo and then leave it somewhere, please don’t.
If you know someone who does this please show them this post and ask them to stop.
Bag it, bin it.
Adding plastic wrapped dog poo to environments is frankly worse than not picking up the poo.

Recently, Juliet and I found three identical poo bags decorating a tree stump in a local beauty spot- 🤮 gross. Some clearly habitually left them there and added to them each walk.
On another path we collected ten different poo bags within a 25m stretch.
Needless to say, we cleared them away.

We help others connect with nature and we find it awful that this thoughtless action causes wildlife pain and suffering.

So please, if you do this, for fox sake, JUST STOP.

🦊
Please share as much as possible to raise awareness. ↪️

03/10/2026

HH Club were hard at work this week jarring some honey into cute little stocking-filler sized jars for our Christmas stall (yes, I’ve done it - I said the C word…!).

They also formed a production line and labelled the honey in double quick time!

Well done guys you were superstars ⭐️