What's in a name - Our Tiny Bees
Why Our Tiny Bees? Quite simple - they're not yours, they're not mine. They're our bees - it's all of our duties to do anything we can to help these incredible creatures, and every little helps.
The people behind the brand.
We are adoptive parents of a quickly flourishing three year old, we have two dogs and live in a titchy cottage in the countryside. If you ever catch us at events around the country you’ll most likely see our other family and friends working with us. We never really planned to have such a successful business but a simple honesty and truely useful skincare has seen our little brand grow and grow.
We work with too many beekeepers to mention, but mostly they can be seen in white suits, Wellies and for some reason lots of them have beards.
Our 'Rules'.
We have a few ‘rules’ that have seen us grow organically over the years and believe it takes little steps to make big things happen.
Rule #1 - If it isn’t useful – it doesn’t go in.
When we make products we make them useful. We could easily make a jar of exotic smelling, chemical filled, environmentally disgraceful goo, and indeed with a nice label we could charge you a fortune for it.
But we don’t.
We find nice, effective goodies (nut oils, nut butters, seed oils and essential oils) and blend them to create something that works, we charge a fair price for our goodness and hard work.
Have a look around our range and be assured in this world of expensive pots of well-marketed chemicals, we are producing artisan skincare packed full of naturally effective ingredients. No animal testing is conducted on our products or any of their ingredients, as much as possible our packaging is widely recyclable or better still re-usable. Honey and Beeswax is harvested from what the bees don’t need.
Rule #2 - If it doesn’t make us happy we don’t do it.
We work directly with British beekeepers who supply us with 100% British honey and wax, we buy English essential oils made by people who took a chance and decided to fill their land with Lavender flowers and make Lavender essential oil. We buy our tins from a lovely UK company that recently sent us our order when they were flooded and had no power (their phone line still worked). We supply cute, creative shops run by people who quit their day job to bring other people good things – often that they themselves cherry pick.
We like good people.
We mean it when we say our natural skin care is good for you and good for British bees.
About Bees
Whilst collecting nectar and pollen bees pollinate flowers. Pollen is collected to feed the baby bees. Nectar a thin sweet liquid collected and converted into honey (the bees reduce the water content of nectar by fanning air over the combs). Honey is used by bees as food - they store extra for winter. They often make way too much honey, which is why we can harvest it, and you can eat it on your toast.
The healthier and stronger a bee colony the more honey they make. This is because the more forage the bees have access too means they store more honey - this stimulates the queen into laying even more eggs which means more bees and in turn more honey. The naturally short life (about 6 weeks) of a bee means that come winter, the colony naturally shrinks to a smaller size where they cluster and slow down through the winter months. As they do so little work (they don’t fly in the winter) the bees live around five months - until the next year. During this time they huddle together and keep a temperature around 35°C, and eat a relatively small amount of honey.
In a hive there are bees lots of them - around 50,000. There is one Queen, thousands of female worker bees, and a few hundred male drones. The Queen is the only egg-laying bee in the entire colony and all other bees look after her. Then there are the male drones that don’t sting and mate with any new queens. All the rest of the bees are the worker bees which are the other 95%, they make honey by collecting nectar and pollen, they also clean the hive and look after the Queen.
Their hive
In a bee hive there are lots of things. The main thing (other that bees) is honeycomb. When they find a new place to live (a hive) they begin to build a structure of wax comb, this is used for everything in the hive. They create small tubes that they fill with various things...
The Queen lays eggs in the cells, which after three weeks hatch into bees.
The worker bees store nectar in the cells - after some time this will turn to honey.
Worker bees collect pollen, this will be fed to the young larvae and bees and this is stored next to the growing larvae.
The honey area (called a super) on top and nest area (called brood box) at the bottom are separated so the super of a hive is filled with honey (and often some pollen).
The thoughts in our minds
More bees is a good thing, we leave them to it and never take too much of the things they make.
A world full of bees would be a fantastic place, they work hard, have order and a fantastic social hierarchy. Every bee has a purpose and gets cracking with its daily jobs. There are nurse bees that tend the young, worker bees that collect pollen and even bees that just go around tidying the hive. Then there is one Queen that can lay 2000 eggs in a day (more than her own body weight).
A strong hive
More eggs means more bees which in turn means a strong hive which collects a surplus of honey and draws out plenty of wax comb to store it in. Bees collect nectar - which ultimately ends up as honey and pollen, which is food for the little ones.
Working with the BBC
As part of our mission of bringing great, natural and delightful bee products to you, we are also passionate about educating people and children about bees. To that end we recently took our people and our tiny bees, to the BBC's Octoberfest and as part of CBeebies we used our observation hive to show, to teach and to inspire.
Many Years later we also had a call with some Dragons.
Did we mention we love bees?