Object of the Month - October 2015

The Hunt Museum is Buzzing

This summer the Hunt Museum welcomed a hive-full of Honey Bees to our newly named wildflower garden 'The Bee-Loud Glade'.

As part of Culture Night 2015 we enlisted the help of some local school children from the JFK primary school in Limerick city to assist in raising awareness of the importance of Honey Bees in the local environment.

We had a great day. The children were greeted by our very own bee keeper Ger (pictured below) who was dressed in his bee suit, ready for action. This immediately got the kids interested in hearing all about the workings of the bee-hive. Ger had some great bee-keeping equipment to pass around and gave everyone the opportunity to get hands on. The kids also learned about honey bee health, honey production and how to care for the bee-hive. This presentation was followed by some really great questions and bee related discussion. After this the children were introduced (from a safe distance of course) to the Hunt Museums own busy working bee-hive!

After all this excitement we held a craft workshop where the children were inspired to make their own fabulous Honey Bees. We planted these in the 'The Bee-Loud Glade' wildflower garden to create a bit of a buzz on Culture Night.

The idea of the children’s honey bee workshop was to educate and raise awareness of local and urban bee-keeping. Everyone can help create a good environment for bees in their own locality and the Hunt Museum workshop helped children to understand the importance of bees.

So come along and see our ‘Bee-Loud Glade’ garden buzzing with honey bees and maybe if you’re lucky you can have a chat with a bee keeper!

Special thanks to Ger McCoy, all the students from JFK primary school, their teachers, acting curator Fiona Byrne, and volunteers Mairéad, Hannah and Alex who also helped the children put this together.