Report from Maggie Hughes
What a fabulous weekend we had at the Food and Drink Festival at the Villa Marina last weekend!
The produce from around the Island is truly wonderful, and the honey from our Manx bees is a first class product. The honey flew off the stall. It was all sold by 2pm on Sunday.
The public were amazed how the taste, colour and texture differed from one honey to another. The top favourite of the honey tasting, was the honey from the Federation’s teaching apiary at Shenharra in St John’s. This was the first year honey has been produced from this fantastic facility.
Thank you to all who helped over the weekend. A special thanks to Linda Cain, our Federation Secretary, who has single handedly breathed new life into our Federation with her ideas, enthusiasm and hard work.
I am busy organizing events for R&DBA over the winter months, details to follow….
And thanks to the Fed Secretary, Linda, and Northern members Maggie and Breeshey from Cilla Platt, Fed Education Officer:
I am sure all the committee would like to join me in saying a big thank you for your immense amount of organisation and work for both the BBQ and The Food Festival.
For those of us who attended the BBQ we could not have had better food or a nicer get together. The fried onions were particularly yum……..!
For those of you who supported our stand at the Food Festival, you could not fail to be impressed by the quality and diversity of the display.It worked the magic we hoped for and we were able to put before the public the huge amount of effort our Federation freely puts in to supporting our bees, and educating the public of their importance.
The sale of honey went extremely well. It was very enjoyable being able to sell such high quality honey from our Federation Apiary and telling the public all about the education and breeding that goes on there.
Thank you Breeshey for yet again stepping up to the mark and doing all the extraction and bottling and labelling on your own!
We are incredibly lucky to have such a dedicated team who put so many hours of unpaid work into making our Federation the exceptional, happy and committed organisation it is..
Cilla
I had a meeting yesterday with a member of the public who had attended the IoM Beekeepers Association Stand at the Food and Drink Festival. He did not arrive until after after all Association Member’s Honey had been sold, but noticed that there were two Beekeeping Stands and was curious to know why.
Thanks to the good work of Linda, Maggie and all you other Association Beekeepers our Association’s Stand stood out exceptionally well. Brilliant, and many congratulations.
Suffice to say, it does remain extremely important that our Association maintains this really exceptional profile. There isn’t a large enough Island population to justify two Beekeeping organisations, so we must encourage all new and existing Beekeepers who are not yet among our Members to join our one and only “Isle of Man Beekeeper’s Association”!