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| Parndon Wood Honey on sale now! |
August has absolutely flown by for us! Maybe it was because we
were so busy! The first weekend in August saw our annual bee weekend alongside
Harlow Beekeeping Association. This was a great weekend, with honey tasting,
candle rolling, live demonstrations, honey cake for sale in the café and
bee-themed arts and crafts for the kids to be occupied with. We had some
excellent bee bags made, which went home filled with lovely was candles! With
all things bee-related going on this weekend we also released our own honey for
sale! It was by far the most popular honey of the weekend, so make sure you pop
into the café to pick a jar up (Jut £5!).
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| Live bee hive demonstrations |
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| Getting crafty with our bee crafts! |
Following the good weather (at least it didn’t rain all the
time!) we had our dragonfly weekend! We managed to find a few nymph cases from
emerged dragonflies from our ponds. We snipped these off and had them available
for our visitors to see. We also snapped a few, with our favourite snap being
of a female Southern Hawker. The dragonfly weekend saw our visitors learning
all about these incredible insects with our trail hunt and also gave them the
chance to make their own lollipop dragonflies too! We have a funny feeling
these will be making an appearance in our visitors’ school scrap books!
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| Southern Hawker Dragonfly |
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| Bug Eyes |
When the sun shone, our animal sightings went up too! Lots
of deer have been spotted from our ‘Deer Hide’ throughout this month, along
with several sights of grass snakes and lizards appearing on the spotters board
in the visitor centre. Lots of visitors have also been spotting our toadlets as
they walked around the trail, so keep an eye out for these and make sure you
don’t stand on any! They’re quite small, only about the size of your little finger
nail, so look a bit like hopping pebbles.
Towards the end of the month we held our final bat walk of
the season. With nearly 80 of you turning up, we were certainly busy but all of
you had a great walk! Lots of bats were spotted once again, so a special thanks
to the experts from
Essex Bat Group (Steve and Frances especially) who have
helped us with these great walks. Keep an eye on the calendar next year for our
next bat walks!
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| Hammer pictures |
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| Forest school village making |
As many of your probably notice, the clock is ticking down
until the kids head back to school (is that a sigh of relief from tired parents
we hear??). Some of you have been at ‘school’ already this summer by
participating in out Forest school! We’ve had an excellent set of sessions this
summer, which saw our students developing their identification skills, social
skills and self-confidence. Some days the weather was kinder to us than others
though! But regardless of weather, there were smiles all around! We’ve made
some fantastic leaf pictures and managed to get a fire to make hot chocolate
and toast marshmallows on in our final session! (Accompanied by biblical
amounts of rain…who doesn’t like a challenge?!). A huge thank you to all the
participants! The success of this school is such that we are planning our next
session as an after school activity, so keep an eye on our Facebook, twitter
and website for updates on this!
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| Toasting marshmallows in the rain! |
We’ve had such a great year that we started looking for an
extra member of staff, so step forward Kathy as our new Café Assistant! Kathy
is a brilliant addition to the team here, so next time you’re in, pop in and
say hello to her!
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