Speaker: Richard Rickitt

Do you know how many eyes a bee has (it’s not two!), or which part of its body it uses to taste with (not it’s tongue!)? Or how many hundreds of miles flying it takes to make one teaspoon of honey for your toast? If the answer is no, this talk will inform, amaze and, hopefully, entertain you. Richard Rickitt gives a fascinating and entertaining talk about bees and beekeeping. You will find out about the extraordinary lifecycle of honeybees, how they live, breed, communicate, and, perhaps most importantly, make honey! This talk takes a peek inside a beehive, explaining the complex, finely-tuned relationship of its tens-of-thousands of inhabitants. Richard Rickitt is the co-editor of BeeCraft, the national beekeeping magazine (established 1919, the world’s oldest beekeeping journal) and author of Beekeeping for Gardeners. He keeps around 30 hives of his own bees as well as a few more for some high-profile locations and individuals. Richard is the beekeeper at Westonbirt, the National Arboretum, where he also teaches beekeeping courses.