Friday September 5th 2025
The Hive at Dalkeith Country Park
Written by Midlothian View Reporter, Liam Eunson
Dalkeith Country park unveilled ‘The Hive’ on Thursday last week, welcoming thousands of bees to their new home in a brand-new, immersive glass observation hive at the Fort Douglas entrance to the park.
Constructing a shed and filling it with an observation hive and signs diaplying facts, the new attraction welcomes an exciting time for the country park, both bee and other animal related.
Working together with a local beekeeper who has many hives in a hidden location within the park, the country park team introduced ‘The Hive’ to provide a new attraction to visitors and welcome ideas of more animal attractions along with being able to provide Dalkeith Country Park honey in their store and potential to include the honey in recipes in the Restoration Yard’s restaurant.
Consisting of a newly constructed shed, the new attraction is home to a bee hive enclosed in a glass enclosure allowing visitors to get up close and personal to the queen bee and her hive.
Visiting The Hive, I spoke to Dalkeith Country Park’s head of attractions and events, Sophie Barr, who explained:
“This time last year we found out we had all these beehives in the estate and it was a secret no one knew about. We were selling honey at the shop at the time but we were selling it as Midlothian Honey.
“I was put in contact with the bee man, and we met for a few coffees and he was telling me about this glass observation hive that you can do and they had one at Glentress. So myself and the rangers went down to Glentress to see if that was something that we could bring to our park because we couldn’t really get customers up to the current hives that are on the estate to protect them and they aren’t really close by.
“So we thought this could be a really cool way of doing it.”
Introducing a simial concept to what’s available at Glentress, Sophie and her team have allowed visitors to get up close and personal to bees which normally isn’t available.
With worries of the bees being too close to the Restoration Yard, the country park team worked closely with the bee man, who they refer to as ‘Jim the beeman’, to efficiently construct a bee observation hive in their own country park.
“We relied on Jim the beeman massively to help us determine what was the right location. Literally, the direction the shed was positioned, all that sort of stuff had to be looked at.
“We thought, why don’t we bring the bees down and make it into a shed and create it like it’s a hive. Then you can step inside and learn all about the bees with the information boards around.
“We wanted the hive to be central but we were slightly concerned that we would have bees flying everywhere. So we literally got a compass out to kind of determine where the bees would fly out and then where they would go because we didn’t want them flying towards the kids in the play park.”
With concerns of bees flying around the Restoration Yard and the nearby kids park, everything had to be considered when planning the hive. Taking a year to finally be open, efficient planning by the country park team and Jim, alongside the help of a nearby lime tree that assisted them in positioning the shed, helped open The Hive to the visiting public.
Despite being a simple addition to the many attractions on offer at the park, the new bee observation shed has brought other exciting opportunities for Sarah and her team. Now changing the name of the honey on sale to Dalkeith Country Park Honey, plans if the honey production continues are to incorporate this locally sourced honey into recipes in the Restoration Yard’s kitchen.
“It has been really busy. We sold out for the first batch of honey which was amazing.”
Unveiling The Hive on Thursday last week, their country park honey sold-out in the first two days with Jim the bee man being asked to bring down some more from his hidden hives.
“We had to ask the bee man to produce more honey, right now we are so busy. We talked about it with our chef but that’s the thing, it’s one thing that’s difficult because you’re never guaranteed the honey.”
Dalkeith Country Park Honey being sold in the country parks shop.
Alongside the honey selling oppurtunity, Sarah plans to introduce information leaflets for kids available at the kids park and in the restaurant, encouraging kids to go along to see the bees through questions that can be answered on the hives information boards.
Since opening on Thursday, the new hive has been popular with the country parks team aiming to turn the new attraction into both an exciting animal addition and an educational outlet for children, planning to invite schools and nursery’s along to learn about the bees.
The signs put up around the shed also act as vandalism prevention, taking many measures to keep their beloved bees, including a camera at the front of the shed that monitors activity.
Following the similar attraction at Glentress, Dalkeith Country Park are hoping this new addition of bees will open up more opportunities for other types of animal attractions, such as cameras monitoring local beavers and deer.
“This has kind of triggered something. We were saying we could get cameras in certain parts of the park that can then link down here to the Restoration Yard so people could be able to watch the park’s animals.
“I feel like this is the start of something for us. It’s gone down really well and now we want to build on that.”
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