Hello there and welcome to Monday! The sun’s still shining here, so I decided to play with some of my favourite honey bees today, inspired by the summer theme at TGIF Challenges using ClarityCrafts ‘Just butterflies & bees’ stamps and the layout from Just Add Ink.

I’ve been tidying up some part finished projects and came across this background piece from last year’s Clarity summer crafting retreat – it’s actually a mop-up on copy paper from cleaning a brayer and a piece of punchinella! I liked the honeycomb shapes from the punchinella, so cut a piece off it, trimmed it into strips and attached it to a piece of black card.

I then stamped the honeycomb outline across the paper, together with several of the bees.

I used a yellow Pergaliner pencil to add colour to the bees and the honeycomb, then attached the topper to a 6×6 card blank, having used a square embedder on gthe card front to create an embossed frame. The final touch was to stamp the stentiments (I realised afterwards that JAI’s sketch has an additional piece here, so I hope the team will excuse that!)

So there you have my summer bees busily making honey to see them through the winter. Did you know that honey bees are the only ones where the whole colony hibernates? Only the queen will survive with other types – she then starts a new colony in the spring. That’s why they need the honey, so they don’t starve over the winter.