After finding the Beef Farm so interesting I willingly volunteered to steward the next farm event involving bees.
I’ve been on the fence about bees for far too long, because I simply don’t know my facts. I hoped this talk would encourage me to take a side and help to end my ignorance. I’ve found this to be only the beginning of a huge internal debate.
So here are some more of my notes from this event- I have totally ignored the orchard side of the talk here sorry, but as interesting as cider is, bees are just more relevant. =p
In Britain now there are 32,000 registered bee keepers, 37 bee farms working currently, which only produce 17% of the honey we eat, the rest is imported.
The bee keeper giving this talk, Peter Guthrie has 100 hives at 10 sites.
Bee keepers, and in fact bees have been having a hard time recently with the weather as seasons and weather are incredibly important to the survival of bees and their production of honey.
(Image from; www.sussex.ac.uk)
A honeys taste and name comes mainly from the time it is harvested, this is to do with what flowers are out when so when apple blossoms are blooming the honey will have an apple blossom flavour. Dandelions happen to be one of bees favourite flowers, so if you want to help the bees stay strong during the spring don’t kill all of your dandelions. Honey is actually regurgitated nector or bee sick.
Have you ever wondered why some people are allergic to wasps while others are allergic to bees? It’s because the venoms of a bee sting is acid while a wasps is alkaline.
Bees can be bred to be sold to other keepers or kept for their honey and wax for foods, preservatives, creams, candles, etc. Wax is the only semi-permeable substance produced in nature. Moving bees around is common practice to pollinate plantations, however it is known to be very stressful to the bees. Most bees used in this country are imported from abroad, from places like America.
The old way to keep bees was in a sket which got burnt killing the bees at the end of each season to get the honey. Luckily this is now considered bad practice and costly. Current bee hives come so that you can remove the honey combs. There are two main types of hive used in the UK. The WBC is a double walled hive and good from small bee keepers. But it comes with a lot of equipment and costs £600 from new. The other type of hive is the national modified hive, single walled, keepers of large numbers of bees use these and it would cost around £500-£600 to get the hive and bees to fill it.
(Image from; www.goodismanlab.biology.gatech.edu)
To collect honey bee keepers smoke the hive. The smoke is made from natural things such as sacking, pine cones as they make a smell preferable to bees. When the hive is filled with smoke the bees gorge on honey then evacuate, but because they are full of honey they are less likely to sting.
It’s important that bee keepers replace what they take from hives with sugars, some use normal sugars from supermarkets but there are worries about the nicocites found in it, though the government says it has no evidence which could ban its use with bees. Other keepers buy sugar from countries that has banned the use of nicocites such as Germany. They then turn this into syrup using up to 3 gallons during the autumn and in the winter turning it into a hard candy placed on top of the hive so that if the bees run out of food they don’t have to waste any energy flying for nectar.
It takes 22,000 bee trips to make 1 pound of honey. Once the honey is finished the bees seal the comb with a little air inside.
Bees make cells in two sizes, the bigger cells are for male bees or drones while the smaller cells are for female bees or worker bees. In a hive there is always 1 queen bee, 30,000-60,000 workers, 300 drones. If a hive becomes congested the older worker bees gorge on honey then swarm to find a new hive. A swarm will have on average 20,000 bees in it. Bee keepers work to avoid this happening by not allowing the hive to become congested by making it larger, or catching the swarm and re-housing them. When bees swarm, first scout bees scour up to 5 miles looking for a likely new home. Meanwhile, swarms always land on the same tree, when they land the young bees secrete a small amount of wax so that if they are stranded there they can build a honey comb to keep warm, each swarm can smell this from the last and will land there.
When a swarm has left the hive any queen eggs hatch. From about 40 queens only one will survive. If one hatches first she will eat the other queens cells, or if a few hatch at the same time they fight to the death. Once a queen is about 5 days old she flies up into the sky and makes a high pitched noise along with secreting pheromones which attracts drones from hives near by. Only the strongest drone that can fly the highest will mate with her, all the drones will die during the flight. A queen bee will live about 5 years, while the worker bees only live 6 weeks during the summer. Three weeks of a worker bees life is spent inside the hive and the last three collecting pollen. In the winter the worker bees live much longer up to three months as they conserve their energy by not flying.
When the hive gets to about 33c the bees have to begin to maintain the temperature of the hive to continue to function. However, in the Autumn the bees bring the temperature of the hive down to 5c. They don’t hibernate but don’t breed or produce any eggs either. To keep a hive warmer and so reduce the amount of honey the bees eat to keep warm keepers can put a quilt or carpet on top of the hive.
A recommended book(that I’ll be reading soon); A World Without Bees, Alison Benjamin & Brian McCallum.
The Crazy Vegan Lady 