Our Week in the Forest...
The walled gardens of Fulham Palace have been a hive of activity recently so the children have been observing and interacting with the constantly evolving environment with its endless rows of colourful flowers, beanstalks that grow by the day and bees that fill the fragrant air. Combined with the children’s innate curiosity this has inevitably generated lots of questions, so it was time to bring in the gardening specialists this week for the children to discover more.
The beekeepers (or apiarist) were an instant hit when they arrived in their beekeeper outfits and they seemed just as excited to have such as attentive audience! The children were fascinated to hear all about the different bees and understand the roles of the worker bees, the drone bees and the queen bee, but how many bees actually live in the hives? The children guessed “One hundred”, “Ten hundred”, unbelievably there are 50,000 bees!!
Along with the opportunity to ask all the questions in the world, particularly about why they need to wear the beekeeper clothes, it was also such a lovely hands-on experience for the children. They had the opportunity to try on the beekeeper’s hat and veil, examine and touch one of the honeycomb plates and best of all taste some of their heavenly honey…
After taking in their experiences one really interesting question that the children asked was how they removed the honey from the honeycomb plate? The answer to this was that the beekeepers had a special machine that spins the honeycomb really fast and all the yummy honey comes flying off!
Next week we are planning to invite some of the Palace gardeners for a special edition of ‘Gardeners’ Question Time’, so watch out as your children may be digging over your gardens in the coming weeks!!
We have also been saying goodbye to many children this week who will be starting their new schools in September. Although it is always a little sad when we say our goodbyes, we feel immensely fortunate to have spent this wonderful time together with them during their days in the forest, watching them blossom into such wonderfully confident children.
Little Forest Folk
Fulham