In 2013 the Arran Trust made a substantial grant of £2,000 to the Arran Bee Group to enabled us to subsidise the buying of 11 nuclei - baby colonies - of honey bees.
The bees were sourced from Dumfries, and are Scottish black bee hybrids. Scottish black bees might not be always as prolific in the honey department as the Italian bees popular over the border, but they get out of bed earlier, and are better able to forage during border line conditions, which is quite often what they get here - bees not liking damp.
Four years, some ups and downs and a few hundred jars of honey later, our bees have blossomed. There are now 57 colonies of honey bees on Arran, and one on Holy Island, busy gathering pollen and nectar from a huge variety of plants, and pollinating them in the process. I have certainly noticed an increase in my yields of pears, apples and soft fruits and I hope you are feeling the benefits, too. Honey bees are essential to life on earth in their capacity as pollinators, and this is why many of us keep bees.