Westbury Bee Group

We are the Westbury Bee Group (WBG), an inclusive not-for-profit organisation (100% of all money raised or donated is ploughed back into the organisation), based at the Westbury Arts Centre at the former Westbury Farm in Milton Keynes, where we have an apiary of approximately 35 beehives (and a large wild colony doing their own thing in an old sentry shed!) and a wildflower meadow in the peaceful expansive grounds. There have been managed beehives at the site for at least the past 30 years, but as there has been a farmhouse on the site since medieval times, it’s likely that bees and beehives have been a feature here for a lot longer! Whilst we are a separate organisation to the Arts Centre itself, we regularly collaborate together and work alongside each other in various voluntary and community environmental projects. We are also currently in discussions with HMP Woodhill to reinstate on site their beehives, which we are presently caring for in our apiary, with a view to eventually running classes in beekeeping inside the facility.

As an organisation we actively reach out to the community to show the importance of honey bees as the Earth’s most prolific pollinators and their importance in maintaining the balance of nature. We run free-of-charge talks and demonstrations, taking our glass-walled live observation hive wherever possible, to schools and clubs, educational stalls at fetes and shows and we run regular apiary tours in the Spring and Summer where adults and children alike can have hands-on experience of handling bees and learning about their lifecycle . We also run beekeeping courses during the active bee season and many of our course graduates now have their own beehives. One of our projects currently in the planning is to make visiting the apiary easier for those with mobility issues by levelling the ground and placing wheelchair access matting.

We are looking for donations to help fund our annual two-day Bee Festival held at the Westbury Arts Centre, Milton Keynes, which this year is on 26th and 27th July. The Bee Festival has proved to be a very popular community event which attracts hundreds of visitors and is an invaluable opportunity to educate and spread the word on honeybees and their ecological and environmental importance to our world. the Festival, helping pay for room and equipment hire and fund attractions such as a professional storyteller, beeswax sheets for candle making, flower seeds and clay for the seed-bomb making, art supplies, stationery for our badge-making machine, catering supplies and other costs; help with this will mean we can in turn plough more money into our projects.