In occasion of the World Bee Day, Castello di Meleto inaugurates on Thursday 20th May the Bee Park, realized also thanks to the project "Nel Nome dell'Ape", launched to promote the breeding of this precious animal. Today our company hosts 40 families of bees.
Spread over a hectare and a half of trees and flowers, destined to become a real "paradise" for bees, it is also an educational place where adults and children can learn about the fascinating world of this extraordinary insect on which 70% of human food resources depend.
About 30 species of flowering trees, shrubs and grasses, will guarantee from March to the end of autumn a show of colors and shapes: Judas trees, lime trees, rosemary, helichrysum, borage, sainfoin and birdsfoot trefoil are just some of the botanical species that will bloom.
The trees will also be the "home" for the families of bees because the hives will be placed under the trees, so that the animals will live in the most natural environment possible.


Why are bees important?
Bees, through their incessant activity of flight from one flower to another, transport pollen from plant to plant allowing pollination and consequently the formation of fruits. There are 130 thousand plants whose lives depend on bees and over 30% of our food is related to their work.
 
The bee hierarchy 
Bees are insects that live in true organized "communities". They can be of three types:
The Queen. She is the only fertile one and, in her lifetime, lays millions of eggs that will become drones or workers. She will decide! Each hive has only one queen bee.
Worker bees. They clean, cool the hive, feed the queen, produce honey and make pollen booty. On average, they live 40 days while the queen lives up to 4 years.
Drones are the males, they have no sting. Their main job is to fertilize the queen.
 
The life of bees
begins with the laying of eggs in the cells by the queen bee.
In three days the egg hatches and becomes a larva, which will be fed by the nurse worker bees with royal jelly, pollen and honey.
The queen becomes a bee in 16 days, the worker in 21 and the drone in 24. In spring and summer, when the population of the hive grows to cope with so much work, the space is no longer enough. The worker bees then decides to feed larvae only royal jelly, to make them queens! Once a new queen is born, the old one will leave the hive bringing with it thousands of workers and will give origin to a new colony: it is the phenomenon of swarming.