The Life of Bees Set & Sheet Set

These beautifully photographed and designed stamps focus on the life within a beehive and on the beekeepers who celebrate the 150th anniversary year of the British Beekeepers Association.

Stamp 1: The Worker

Fertilised eggs laid by the queen bee become worker bees, the vast majority of the hive population. Worker bees are all female; they do all the work in the hive; in their six-week life they clean the hive, raise brood, feed and care for the queen, ventilate the hive, make wax comb, guard the hive, and then in their final three weeks they leave the hive to collect nectar and pollen. In the winter, longer-lived worker bees cluster around the queen, keeping her alive until spring.

Stamp 2: The Drone Bee

Drone bees are male, and they come from unfertilised eggs. A drone’s sole purpose is to mate with a queen during her mating flight; when he is successful, it is his last act, he falls to the ground dead. Drones are fed by worker bees and at the end of summer when the mating season is over, he and his brothers are all ejected from the hive.

Stamp 3: The Queen Bee

The lone queen’s role is to lay up to 2,000 eggs a day. She is fed and groomed by the worker bees and is queen in name only, with her fate decided by the colony. Queens develop from fertilised eggs laid by the previous queen in special cells; the larva is fed royal jelly, causing her to grow larger. A single mating flight is enough to fertilise every egg she will lay in her lifetime.

Stamp 4: Pollination

Bees collect high protein pollen to feed to developing larvae. From the earliest days of spring worker bees collect pollen, packing it into the pollen baskets on their legs.  Bees fertilise many of the plants and trees that give us food; along with other crucial pollinators they are responsible for much of the biodiversity we see around us. Farmers encourage local beekeepers to place hives on their farms to improve pollination rates.

Stamp 5: Honey

Honey is the sweet byproduct of beekeeping, and as bees overproduce to such a great extent, it is a sustainable food source. Bees collect nectar in a special honey stomach; in the hive, younger worker bees fan the nectar to dehydrate it, making honey. Nectar from different flowers produces honey with different flavours, colours, and textures. It is possible for a hive to produce an excess of up to 50 kilos of honey in a good season; beekeepers leave enough for the colony to survive winter and if the season has been poor, they will take no honey from the bees at all.

Stamp 6: The Beekeeper

In the wild, bees live in trees and caves, historically, collecting honey meant raiding a wild colony. Over thousands of years beekeepers have developed ways of providing the perfect home for a honeybee colony. The beekeeper understands that each colony is like an individual being; to reproduce, bees swarm and through careful management of this behaviour the beekeeper can increase populations, benefitting us all.

***Orders limited to three per customer***

Omission of Royal Cypher on Gummed Values

The Isle of Man Post Office very much regrets that the entire supply of ‘The Life of Bees’ issue in sheets with normal gum has been printed with the Royal cypher omitted: the error affects all six values.

The error does not affect the self-adhesive version of the stamps printed as a sheetlet which was produced by a different process.

Philatelic products had already been prepared using stamps with the error: these will remain on sale until stocks are exhausted or the planned withdrawal date of the 31st December 2024 is reached.

Customers who have received the incorrect stamps may, if they wish, return these for a full refund.

This is an abridged version of the 'Omission of Royal Cypher on Gummed Values' Statement. To see the full statement please click here