Bees and honey

A honey workshop for sweet-toothed travellers.

Imagine spending a morning in a HONEY WORKSHOP, where you’ll be able to learn about the different types of bee and the role that each one performs in the hive, their worst foes and how to extract and then package the honey. We’ll have a honey tasting session and sample other products from beehives such as pollen, propolis, royal jelly and meloja, while learning about their health-giving properties. You’ll also experience at first hand how relaxing it can be to manipulate beeswax and how to share space with bees without running any risk of being stung.

The relationship between mankind and bees is extremely ancient. The first evidence of the relationship in the Iberian Peninsula comes from cave paintings dating back 8,000 years in the Araña Cave (Valencia). It has always been a highly fruitful relationship (especially for the humans!) owing to the bees’ tireless love of hard work. This is the source of some extraordinary statistics: to harvest a single load of nectar, a bee needs to visit between 1,000 and 1,500 flowers, and may make an average of 10 journeys per day. To obtain a kilo of pollen they require approximately 60,000 trips!

Adverse climates and the use of pesticides have greatly increased the death toll among bees. Apart from a fall in the production of honey and other bee-derived products, the main consequence of this catastrophic decline in bee numbers is a lack of pollination both in crops and wild species, which in turn has had a disastrous economic impact on many farms and the biodiversity of many habitats. One of the functions of this workshop is to draw attention to the precarious state of the natural world, and to raise awareness of the importance of preserving bees and protecting their role as pollinators if the planet is to have a chance of survival.