Daisy spoke of her desire for helping those from less fortunate backgrounds than herself to turn their life around. She is passionate in her mission to help reduce re-offending rates and is hoping to achieve this through creating initiatives to help prisoners gain and harbour new hobbies, skills and interests.
As a participant of the unlocked scheme, one of her tasks was to create a new scheme to improve prisoner engagement within her allocated prison in Wigan, Greater Manchester. She thought long and hard about it waiting for that moment of inspiration until finally she had it! “I just ran into my manager’s office and said ‘Bees! We could do Bees!’ and just got so excited about”.
Daisy’s scheme, which she named the ‘Bee Better Project’ has a series of major goals and primarily, “aims to engage prisoners in environmental issues in an interesting way”.
Bees are so important for the environment and contribute to it in an abundance of ways, such as through their vital role as pollinators to promote plant reproduction. In fact, their positive environmental influence is so great that without them, it is likely that our gardens would all look pretty bare…
Bees can also be very therapeutic for individuals and seem to give out pheromones which can be calming and relaxing for some people. Daisy states:
“Even if I’m having a stressful day, I’ll go and stand by the hives for 5 minutes, watching the bees. I find it really soothing”.
Although the project has only been running for 6 weeks, Daisy reflected on the brilliant engagement and reactions which it has already received from both staff and prisoners of Wigan Prison.
“Even if it’s just one day out of a cell, talking about and seeing bees, it’s something different.”
Ideally, the hives will start to produce honey. This will allow more individuals to get involved in the scheme through processing, labelling and selling the honey produced by the bees. In addition, the money raised from honey sales can then be reinjected into the project to create further expansions and improvements.
In early September, the Beeble team have very kindly been invited to visit the bees at Wigan Prison. As well as being shown the bees, we will also be running a short workshop with the prisoners, led by our creative director, Harry, who will be helping the prisoners to design labels for their honey.
If you are keen to hear more about the `Unlocked scheme’ and the ‘Bee Better Project’, Daisy will be giving a talk at our beekeeping course, which will be held on the 12th September and can be booked here. It should be a super enjoyable day filled with lots of informative content and most importantly, you will become an expert on beekeeping!!
Written by Hester
