Honey bees are in trouble. And therefore so are we. Einstein’s theory that the
loss of honey bees will lead inevitably to the loss of the human race in as
little as four years has been much quoted in recent times.
A huge number of plants, especially food crops, rely on insects to help them
to reproduce and nothing does it with more vigour and efficiency than the
honey bee.
And while pollinating crops is vital to our survival, bees can provide other,
more unexpected services as well: only a few days ago trials concluded that
their venom could be used to treat some forms of cancer.
But wild populations in Britain and elsewhere are in serious decline —
pesticides, pollution and the arrival in the Nineties of the bee-killing
mite varroa have all taken their toll — so it seemed that the best way to
alleviate this problem was to keep bees myself.
I contacted my local beekeeping association to find out about courses. Prime
beekeeping time is between April and the end of July, so early June was
leaving it a bit late in the season.
It wasn’t running any courses, but the association’s secretary did say that
she would ask her members if anyone had any bees to sell, so if I found a
course I could get started before the end of the season. Many of the
beekeeping courses I found online were one-day introductory courses but I
wanted something that would be a little more in-depth.
Monkton Wyld Court, a Victorian rectory in Charmouth, Dorset, runs various
residential courses, including two-day courses with a local beekeeper, David
Wiscombe, pictured right with me. Before he retired, Wiscombe was a science
teacher at a school where the headmaster kept bees.
They were seen as an important part of the syllabus and when the headmaster
retired, Wiscombe was persuaded to take charge of the school hives. That was
almost 50 years ago and he has been keeping bees ever since.
“At first,” he said, “it was all about the honey. Now it’s more about the bees
themselves. You learn something new about them every day.”
The six of us gathered in the old library, all with our own reasons for
wanting to keep bees: Mandy, Wiscombe’s wife, had decided that after 28
years of marriage the time had come to learn about bees so that she could be
of more help with them.
Tom, who works at Monkton Wyld Court, wanted to be able to look after the
rectory’s own bees when the beekeeper was away. Jen had an extensive
vegetable garden and wanted bees for pollination.
Delia found bees in a bird-box in her garden in Bristol and it inspired her to
learn about keeping bees, and Anne lived in a commune and wanted to be as
self-sufficient as possible. Everyone was aware of the importance of bees to
our environment and felt that keeping bees would help.
I admit that I thought beekeeping was a gentle, unchallenging pastime for the
retired. I was wrong. Good beekeeping is an art, an act of devotion and most
of all the result of a deep and practised study of the natural history of
bees. We had much to learn.
A hive isn’t just a wooden box but a carefully thought-out jigsaw of pieces
designed with a detailed knowledge of how bees behave. All the parts must
fit together in specific order.
Then there are the bees themselves: we needed to be able to identify the
workers, the drones and the queen and know what they all do, and to learn
how to spot signs of disease or varroa or discontented bees that might kill
the queen or swarm.
Part of the course was held outside, among some of Wiscombe’s hives. We looked
slightly ludicrous in bee suits and bright, yellow rubber gloves as he
demonstrated how to light a smoker. This vital bit of beekeeping kit helps
to control the bees, but keeping it lit is easier said than done.
Tom struggled to keep his bits of torn-up egg-box alight, while Mandy created
enough smoke to send signals to the next county.
Opening a hive is a hold-your-breath moment. A gentle waft of smoke calms the
bees down, so you can then lift the lid and the crown board beneath it. A
great seething mass of activity is revealed: thousands of bees all busily
going about their business. Another waft of smoke and Wiscombe showed us how
to lift out a frame without disturbing the bees.
We were all a little apprehensive, fearing that the bees might rise up in an
angry cloud, stingers at the ready. They didn’t. Instead we had a close-up
view of the inner workings of a bee hive and it was compelling stuff.
Wiscombe showed us how to spot eggs, larvae, capped brood and honey stores.
Being able to see these things tells the keeper whether the hive is
functioning properly, the queen is laying and the workers looking after her.
The eggs are almost impossible to spot at first — tiny speckles that lie at
an angle in the bottom of the wax cells the bees have drawn out from the
frame.
In just three days those eggs become larvae, which then pupate, in the same
way as caterpillars, sealed by the workers into their own chambers. A few
more days and they emerge, brand new cogs in the extraordinary machine that
is a bee colony.
The sheer quantity of information we had to take in was overwhelming, but the
second day helped to consolidate everything. We got better at opening hives
and taking out frames and phrases such as capped brood, supers and queen
excluders rolled off our tongues surprisingly naturally.
But did we feel up to putting all this into practice? Back in Monmouthshire, I
was put in touch with a local beekeeper who could sell me a nucleus — a
small colony with a young queen. When I opened the hive for the first time,
almost all the frames were full of eggs, larvae and capped brood and honey
oozed from the stores at the top of the frames. The bees were thriving.
Now I’ve got another layer on the hive — the super, the honey collecting
chamber — and despite starting late in the season I might just get a tiny
crop of honey this year.
But as Wiscombe said, it’s not about the honey, it’s about having a hand in
the long-term survival of these remarkable creatures. And as one of my
fellow students said “It’s like a whole world in a box — 50,000 bees and you
look after them. There’s something special about that.”
Getting started
Equipment: You will need a beekeeper’s suit, gloves, a smoke cannister,
and a hive. The choice of hives ranges from a traditional wood frame version
costing from £100 to the “Beehaus”, a stylish, urban rooftop model costing
£465 (www.omlet.co.uk).
Bees: You will need about 5,000 bees, including a queen and a “sealed
brood” (unhatched bees). Prices vary widely depending on availability —
expect to pay at least £75. Despite the acute need for new colonies of bees,
there can be many restrictions on where hives can be sited.
Beekeeping courses: Kate Humble attended a two-day course at Monkton
Wyld Court in Dorset (www.monktonwyldcourt.co.uk)
costing £195. Visit www.britishbee.org.uk
for other courses.
Beekeeping supplies Maisemore Apiaries, www.bees-online.co.uk;
Thornes Beekeeping Supplies, www.thorne.co.uk
Bee-friendly plants: Buddleia, lavender, traditional cottage garden
plants and native wildflowers such as hollyhocks, bluebells and foxgloves.
Also, heathers and herbs such as thyme.
The Drive for Good Hives
Ged Marshall has been a professional beekeeper for 25 years and is
philosophical about the gloom and doom surrounding his industry. “To be a
beekeeper you have to be an optimist,” he says. Marshall is one of about 50
beekeepers in Britain who earn a living from honey production.
He and his wife, Sheila, run British Honey Producers, based in the village of
Steeple Claydon, Buckinghamshire. They collect honey from other producers,
most of which goes to Rowse Honey in Wallingford, Oxfordshire, the leading
packager of honey.
Marshall has 300 hives, which he drives around the country in search of the
best sites for nectar for the 50,000 bees in each hive. He aims to produce
22,000 1lb jars of honey a year (about ten tonnes) in order to sustain the
farm.
His first job this spring was to take 34 hives to Hadlow Place Farm near
Tonbridge, Kent, to pollinate more than 125 acres of Bramley and Gala
apples, as well as 25 acres of Conference pears.
The bees stayed there for three weeks, which is longer than they are usually
allowed on other farms, because of the stringent demands on fruit size that
major supermarkets make on producers.
“I take far fewer bees down to Kent now, because it is quite a long way and
the farmers are likely to ring you up and say ‘get them out’ overnight.
Farmers need a reasonable number of large-sized apples. They then spray and
kill off the remaining flowers, so they don’t want too much pollination,”
Marshall explains.
At Hadlow Place Farm this does not happen. “It’s all down to supermarkets
really,” says the farm’s manager, Nigel Gibb. “Some people whip the bees
away, but we hand-pick the smaller apples, so we wait until the bees have
finished their job.” Once the apple blossom is pollinated, Marshall moves
his bees on to other crops such as oilseed rape, which is “good for yielding
nectar”.
However, the prized crop is borage, grown to produce a highly regarded oil for
health shops, but which is becoming scarcer as a result of imports from
China and New Zealand. Heather is a later crop, but the transport costs
involved in travelling to the moors mean that it is often not worth the
expense. After that there are lime and chestnut trees.
As for all the nay-saying about bees facing extinction, Marshall has less
pessimistic views. “The bottom line is that it is a lot harder to keep bees
alive now. In the old days you threw them in a box at the bottom of the
garden and you would have bees for years.
This time last year, all these stories about bee losses were a great excuse
for poor beekeeping. I had a bad winter two years ago, but this winter the
bees have survived. I’m using all new equipment and I burnt all the old
frames. I think there are times when you become complacent, and you pay for
it.”
Steve Benbow who looks after the rooftop hives at Fortnum’s, also manages 700
hives for the honey distributor Tropical Forest, and has 100 hives of his
own near Shrewsbury, Shropshire. He is keen to emphasise that beekeeping is
weather dependent.
“The bees this spring were in really good condition. The weather is important.
In a wet season they all stay inside the hives. They are very sociable and
rub against each other, so disease is spread. Before this year we had two
wet years and winters.”
Professor Francis Ratnieks is the UK’s only professor of apiarism, based at
the University of Sussex in Brighton. He has launched the Sussex Plan for
Honey Bee Health and Wellbeing, a long-term project to improve the outlook
for honey bees, having raised more than £500,000 from private donations and
matched funding, including £100,000 from Rowse.
“I am very, very impressed by how concerned the British public seem to be
about the honey bee,” he says. The Sussex Plan will be the largest project
of its type in the UK and, although the Government recently announced £10
million to fund research into honey bees and “other insect pollinators”,
Ratnieks believes that he will receive only a tiny fraction of that and that
it is unlikely the money will be available to his department until 2011.
He says the good news about bees is that the public have become aware of the
problem. “We have raised £400,000, but we need much more. We are looking to
breed a healthy, safe, bee. All bee colonies will die — we just don’t want
them declining within the hives.”
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