#garden bumblebee

#P🩷I🩷N🩷K is back…🌸💖💓

The garden bumblebee has a golden yellow band on the front and rear edge of the thorax with a wide black area in between. The first tergite of the abdomen is also golden yellow, the middle limbs are black and the end of the abdomen has white hairs.

This last Thursday, while I was on holiday with my parents and our doggos in Northumberland, we got to visit an actual honey farm! It was my first-ever time going to one! 🐝🍯💝

The place was Chain Bridge Honey Farm, in Berwick-upon-Tweed, which as you can tell from the sign in that sixth picture is right on the border with Scotland. The good boys came with us that day, as well, because I can confirm that it's dog-friendly there. I brought my IKEA Skogsduva with me (I always take all eight of my stuffed bees with me on my holidays), and she got to see and do a load of things with me. It was an incredibly lovely place to visit to the point where I genuinely felt sad when it was time to go a few hours later. 💘

First we went into an area called the Beekeeper's Garden, where there were a ton and I genuinely mean a TON of bees flitting around, and all different kinds, too! There were of course honey bees, and various bumblies - white-taileds, buff-taileds, and some garden bumbles and early bumbles - as well as a couple of common carder bees! Some flower bushes just had a constant ambience of buzzing coming off them because there were that much of a sheer number of bees out and about in the garden. 🤩

And I even got to see some of the bumblebees in the middle of doing buzz pollination! For those who don't know, buzz pollination is when bumblies and some solitary bees shake pollen out of flowers for gathering it by vibrating their wings against the pollen while inside the flower, which creates a much higher-pitched buzz. 🌼

Then the two of us and my parents went and had a drink and snack from the on-site café, where the payment and indoor seating (we sat outdoors) was inside one of those old-timey buses, and, understandably, several things available were honey-themed. Me and Skogsduva had a piece of honey sponge cake and a mocha which were incredibly delicious, and the staff were really friendly as well. And while we were sat at our café table, an actual, full-on swarm of honey bees from one of the farm's hive boxes went overhead for a minute or two! They were just passing by. 🤗

At one point, we walked five minutes down the road to the Chain Bridge that the honey farm's next to, to give the dogs a chance to have a walk without their leads, and as you can see I got up to a spot of tomfoolery with Skogsduva and some statues we found. The Bee House in that last photo is a little thing I thought I'd have another bit of photo fun with when we walked back to the farm and I found it outside the visitor centre. 🥰

The one of her in front of that painting was taken on an observation deck, where we got to actually see honey being prepped by staff in a work area at the farm, for getting packaged into jars and sold. <3

After a visit to the gift shop, me and my parents ended up bringing back two jars of different honey varieties made at the farm, and I made a personal purchase of a jar of honey-based, lavender-scented hand cream because my hands seem to be having weird a habit of getting rather dry lately. 💕

In short, Chain Bridge Honey Farm for last Thursday was, to me, the best day of the week's holiday because it was nothing but lovely to visit, and - bees being one of my dual central special interests - I was basically living the dream in terms of seeing that special interest come to life so abundantly. You can't fully see it in this picture, but I of course chose to spend the day wearing a dress I've got that has bumblebees as part of its pattern (with bonus points going to the adorable 1950s-style skirt area I found out it has). ✨️🫶

Bonus photos below: some of the actual bees I saw at the farm, including a whole load of honey bees living in a hive box! They were probably the swarm that went overhead while we were at the café table.~

Garden Bumblebee