A few weeks ago, we were fortunate enough to visit the Oundle Beekeeping Society during the closing stages of the season, just before the bees enter hibernation. We were able to get many key insights into the Oundle beekeeping setup, begun by the innovating Headmaster F.W. Sanderson during the early twentieth century. This tradition has been inherited by Miss Comb and Mrs Gould, the current school beekeepers, who we were lucky enough to briefly interview during our visit. The remainder of the beekeeping team is made up of pupils, for whom it is a Wednesday afternoon activity. Oundle Beekeeping is generally one of the most popular Wednesday afternoon activities, and while this may be due to the stigma associated with crawling through bushes in the pouring rain during CCF, it is clear that Beekeeping does have its own considerable merits.

During the summer, the ten pupil beekeepers perform a selection of roles, such as gardening and weed cutting which allows for easier access to the bees, cleaning the hives, harvesting honey from the frames, and jarring the honey. This process produces roughly thirty pounds of honey per hive, with harvesting happening in September and May. This therefore allows the beekeepers to sell the honey in Cloisters during break time, a heavily anticipated occurrence. Once the bees go into hibernation, the beekeeping team begins, in a slightly more relaxed fashion, to prepare for the return of the bees during the spring.

However, Oundle Beekeeping is not without its strife, as seen with the recent loss of a hive due to an unexpected swarm, where the bees abandoned the hive, while another hive failed to make it through the winter, thus reducing Oundle Beekeeping to only one hive. Luckily enough, however, a new swarm was quickly found near Oundle and relocated to the School hives, although the honey from these new hives is not yet being harvested. The new swarm needed a new home, and therefore the beekeepers got to work building and painting a new hive to house the homeless bees. This is one of the activities the beekeepers did during the winter while the bees were hibernating.

Every year, the society elects a new ‘Queen Bee,’ the pupil leader of the beekeeping team, through common consensus between the previous Queen Bee and the teachers, providing a pupil beekeeper with an opportunity for responsibility within the society, thus acting in a similar capacity within the society to a head of house within the boarding house. This year’s ‘Queen Bee’ is Beatrice Struthers, U6 of Sanderson, who joined the team in Fifth Form like the majority of the U6th members. At the moment, during most sessions, the team meets near the netball courts at the ‘shed’, where all their tools for gardening and collecting the honey are kept. They share this shed with the grounds staff but are planning to get their own shed closer to the hives for the storage of the various beekeeping tools as well as their suits. The full-body white suits are a crucial piece of the beekeeping armoury, highly important for preventing repeated wounds from the bees, with no holes but for the mesh in the mask, while also allowing the beekeepers to look truly iconic while tending to the hives.

Having beekeeping as an option at Oundle School really shows the diversity of options that pupils are able to take after Fourth Form, with pupils able to move from CCF to caring for thousands of insects, an activity which imparts important lessons concerning responsibility.

Written by
Kit and Ed

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