A Guest Post From Our Museum Beekeepers

Back in 2012,  Campbell’s blog post Beekeeping in ancient Egypt and today mentioned that we hoped that the Museum would soon have its own beehive – and now it does!

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Keen eyed visitors to our Ancient Worlds galleries may have spotted the inscriptions of bees on display but we also now have a rooftop hive.

In fact we’ve just   come to the end of the season for beekeeping for 2014. We’ve put them to bed for the winter.

The bees worked really hard to produce 3 supers (one of the boxes that hold the honeycombs in the hive) of honey.
Their numbers will reduce, though a core group will remain. Gathering round the queen fanning with their wings to regulate the temperature for the queen. We extracted the honey and have left one super with them to see them through the winter months.

Checking on the bees earlier this year

Pollen laden bees return to the hive

Spinning the honeycombs to extract honey

The winter can be a tough time for bees so it’s the honey will be needed to fuel this activity as they can’t forage during winter. Hopefully this honey will see them through until the more clement weather in the spring.

The honey they have produced is a delicious and citrusy crop flavoured by the foraging from the lime trees across campus.
While we haven’t yet had enough honey to share widely it’s been a really good year for our bees, we have seen the arrival of a new queen and the colony has grown and gone from strength to strength.
We’re hoping for a short and mild winter to give them a good start for the new year.

One of the Museum’s two objectives is ‘Working towards a sustainable world’ which is a big part of why we support the bees as they’re essential to the pollination process and a healthy environment.

Ours is one of a number of hives across the Manchester Partnership. Manchester Art Gallery have two, we have one and the Whitworth is set to join the fun in March 2015 – following the opening.

While we don’t have enough honey to sell this year you can still win some by suggesting a name (with a link to Manchester Museum and our collections)  via our Facebook or Twitter by this Sunday

Sam, Sally & Steve
(with thanks to Campbell)

10/11/14 Bob Partridge Memorial Lecture: Dr Renée Friedman on Hierakonpolis

Syenite vessel from the site of Hierakonpolis (Acc. no. 2755)

The next Manchester Ancient Egypt Society Bob Partridge Memorial Lecture will be given by Dr. Renée Friedman (British Museum)

Everything in its Place: New Views of the Elite Predynastic cemetery at Hierakonpolis.

Monday 10th November, 7:30pm

Pendulum Hotel, Sackville Street, Manchester, M1 3AL

All welcome

Hierakonpolis is famous as the home of the Palette of King Narmer, but on-going work at the site is revealing the tombs of kings some 500 years earlier, who expressed their power not only in the size and wealth of their graves set with above-ground architectural compounds, but also with the people and intriguing array of wild and domestic animals they took with them to the afterlife. This unique collection of animals gives insight into the physical reality behind early symbols of power, while the architectural settings in which the burials are arranged is revealing how the early Egyptians understood and ordered their world. This lecture will present our current thoughts on this remarkable cemetery modified as required by the new discoveries to be made in the January-March 2014 season of excavation at the site.

Dr. Renée Friedman is a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley in Egyptian Archaeology and has worked at many sites throughout Egypt since 1980.With special interest in the Predynastic, Egypt’s formative period, in 1983 she joined the team working at Hierakonpolis, and went on to become the director of the Hierakonpolis Expedition in 1996, a title she still holds. Currently the Heagy Research Curator of Early Egypt at the British Museum, she is the author of many scholarly and popular articles about all aspects of the fascinating site of Hierakonpolis.