Colin, our Lingfield Point Bee Keeper
In a quiet corner in the Lingfield Allotments there is a hive of activity! As you may already know we are very fortunate here at Lingfield Point to have our very own bees. We have two strains of bee – and Italian and a strain all the way from New Zealand – we’re very continental!
Both hives have produced a decent amount of honey despite early set backs. In September we extracted our fourth batch of honey and Jenny from Marchday was lucky enough to bee there!
“I was a little wary as Colin, our resident Lingfield Point Bee keeper had been stung on a number of occasions, so I donned the bee keeper suit and triple checked it for holes!”
“We start by smoking the bees, this calms them and makes them less aggressive. Then, once the lid is off the hive, it’s time to remove the ‘supers’, these are the frames where the bees build up the hexagonal wax cells (comb) and where the honey gets stored.
“With a little shake and a brush for those stubborn bees, the supers are removed and put neatly into a storage box. The bees are, of course, pretty grumpy about us taking their honey, so they are all around us and it feels like they are trying to get into our suits! One manages to and poor Colin is stung on his hand – poor bee too, honeybees are the only bees that die after they sting.
“We then take the Supers into a clean and sterile room, which is kept nice and warm. The supers are then carefully placed into a honey extractor – this is a manual spinning machine, which requires a fair amount of time and patience to spin the honey out of the combs.
“The honey then has a little time to settle, so all the waxy bits from the comb can float to the top and can be skimmed off (this is re-used to feed the bees). The honey is then put into jars.
“In the end, our Lingfield honey bees produced about 25lbs (50 jars) of honey and with the hives now established, fingers crossed next year will be even better.
Yum!
Interesting facts about honey bees
- There are three types of bees in the hive – Queen, Worker and Drones.
- Queens can live for up to 5 years.
- Honeybees are the only insects that produce food for humans.
- Just a single hive contains approximately 40-45,000 bees.
- Bees can recognize individual human faces.
- The average worker bee produces about 1/12th teaspoon of honey in her lifetime. A worker bee lives for about 6 weeks.
- A hive of bees will fly 90,000 miles, the equivalent of three orbits around the earth to collect 1 kg of honey.
- It takes one ounce of honey to fuel a bee’s flight around the world.
- A honey bee visits 50 to 100 flowers during a collection trip
- According to Albert Einstein, If the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, man would have no more than four years to live
| Posted in General, Jenny Carr, Lingfield Point, Marchday | Tagged bees, Customer service, Darlington, honey, honey bees, lingfieldpoint, local food production, North East, organic food, sustainability, Value for money |
Wayne Hemingway in the affordable apartments he designed for key workers in Manchester. Photo: Don McPhee.
At Marchday we’re big fans of the Fashion Trendsetter turned Community Guru Wayne Hemingway. We were really impressed by the special qualities Wayne’s company Hemingwaydesign brought to the Taylor Wimpey scheme, Staiths Southbank in Gateshead.
Space for people to get together.
The scheme reminded us of much of the good stuff we saw in Malmo, Sweden earlier this year where the design of the space for community interaction between the buildings is given equal importance to the design of the buildings themselves.
We share many values in relation to creating communities, regeneration and design and read with interest Wayne’s recent comments about successful communities in The Guardian.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/housing-network/2011/sep/27/people-decent-housing-successful-communities?INTCMP=SRCH
We’re excited about creating the first new homes at Lingfield Point next year and making real the sustainable mixed community around our existing business community. We hope Mr Hemingway would approve of our plans!
| Posted in General, John Orchard, Lingfield Point | Tagged Art, hemingwaydesign, malmo, redordead, Regeneration, sustainability, sustainablecommunities, valueformoney, Waynehemingway |
The Marchday Literary Committee meet for a good yarn.
Here at Marchday we’re keen on Twitter and we love a good story.
To combine the two and celebrate the launch of Marchday’s newest building YARN@Lingfield Point, Darlington we’re inviting budding wordsmiths to spin us a yarn on twitter. All you have to do is write a ‘ripping yarn’ in 130 characters or less and add the hashtag #spinayarn to bring it up to the Twitter limit of 140. You choose the subject but it needs to be short, razor sharp and to the point. The competition closes on November 11. The Marchday Literary Committee will then sit to choose the winner and award the much coveted Golden Bobbin. The winner will be announced week commencing 5 December.
‘Yarn is aimed at small companies who want to punch above their weight and impress their customers. The space is some of the most memorable we’ve created. At Yarn our customers may only pay for a small amount of space but benefit from all the fantastic communal facilities. We all love twitter and thought it would be fun to run the competition and put the Golden Bobbin up for grabs.’ said John Orchard, a Director at Marchday.
Just a few weeks after the launch of YARN more than half of the space is already let. However, there are still spaces of between 250sqft and 1,000sqft available.
John tweets as @johnny_niblick, Tim as @timstephen and collectively Marchday tweets as @marchdaygroup. You can follow the goings on at Lingfield Point at @lingfieldpoint or the wonderful musings of @chairmaneddie.
So, come on, give it a go!
| Posted in General |
Today saw the launch of Marchday’s latest new business space ‘Yarn’ at Lingfield Point Darlington.
Yarn is Marchday’s latest flexible workspace aimed at SME’s.
John Orchard, director of Marchday gave some insight into the idea;
“We worked with Glasgow based workplace gurus Graven Images to produce an interior which is strikingly different from the norm. We’ve aimed Yarn at small and medium size businesses who want to be associated with something memorable and stylish. They may only want to pay for a small dedicated office space but have use of all the communal meeting and breakout rooms. The very fact they’ve chosen to work in this building says a lot about their business to their clients.”
Space within Yarn has already started to let. For further details contact Sara Williams at sara.williams@lingfieldpoint.co.uk or David Jackson at david.jackson@sandersonweatherall.com, or you can always pop in to the management suite and say “how d’you do”!
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