We know that most honeybees in the UK exist in commercial hives, being "farmed" for honey. This takes its toll on the wild honeybee population, along with the use of herbicides, pesticides, declining natural habitat (they like to live in tree hollows), and of course there are the usual predators to contend with.
Charity Buddy is on a mission to create more natural-style bee-centric hives to help honeybees to thrive, and embarked on a journey to provide local honeybees with suitable hives that they could freely occupy.
During 2024, our Charity has installed 5 natural style hives within our rewilding site in Surrey, however, these hives were both heavy to handle, and costly to produce, so with that in mind, one of our recent workshop attendees has created a hive from reclaimed materials which is both affordable and light enough for members of the general public to install themselves.
We'd like to help wild honeybees enjoy safe, insulated hives through out the UK, and so we are offering our hives for sale at cost for £200.
All we ask is that if you'd like to order a hive, you are confident that you have enough suitable forage locally to sustain the bees that will occupy the hive.
Want to find out more?
https://www.charitybuddy.org/honeybees
Natural log hive workshop with Matt Somerville this weekend at Maple Farm!
Another great step in our endeavours to help bees 🐝 live as naturally as possible. We have already erected some tree hives which are thriving with wild honey bees.
Now we want to demonstrate that it is possible to use kinder, more bee-centric hives to enable people to harvest honey 🍯 in a way that doesn’t rip apart their brood nest at every inspection, enables them to keep warm and cool, and thrive without too much human intervention.
#layenshive #layensbeekeeping #beekind #beekind🐝 #naturelovers #organicfood #bethechange
What’s not to love about rats? 🐀 💚
At Charity buddy, we love ALL animals, not just pets or farm animals, but ALL animals.
And we’re sharing this video to show you the rats that live here. They’re wild, and their homes are in burrows around the hedgerows and in underground tunnels. They’ve been around for a long time and they come to the chicken house area to feed on the excess grain that the chickens birds and squirrels have left behind. They tidy up. They don’t hurt anybody. They’re just like every other animal with family to feed, and a life to live. So many people are frightened of rats or believe that they cause health issues. They have a bad reputation, but they don’t deserve it. If you truly love animals, please try and include rats in that lineup ❤️
Welcome to 6 new rescue hens!
We’re delighted to welcome these lovely ladies to our sanctuary at Maple Farm.
💚🐔🧡
How exciting!! On Easter Monday, 1st April we will be installing two “natural” bee 🐝 hives high up in the trees, and adding a more bee-centric Layens hive at our rewilding project, here at Maple Farm. Our bees are free, and we would love them to naturally swarm and populate these new homes. Later on in summer we’ll be running a workshop to make natural log hives to help house more wild bees in Surrey (details to follow). Thank you to the Community Foundation for Surrey for your support and The Surrey Hills Trust Fund.
